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Frugalfilmmakers is going to NAB

 

After many years of not going to the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, it is time to go again. This is the biggest media show of the year and even though it has the name broadcaster in it, this show has evolved into the biggest media equipment show.

The HDSLR revolution is well represented at this convention now. All the manufactures will be there as well a lot small guys who do speciality equipment and software. These are the booths I like to find. The majors are coming around to make things for us frugal filmmakers as well. I will report on what I find.

If you can make it there are free passes to the trade show, which is the best part of the convention. (Warning: your feet will be exhausted at the end of the day.)

There will be a free HDSLR Meetup at the Hard Rock Cafe on Monday at 5pm right after the trade show closes.

Also on Tuesday, April 12, there will be the Final Cut Pro Supermeet at Bally's Hotel Event Center. Doors open 4:30PM for SuperMeet Digital Showcase featuring 35 vendors and Plenty of networking. How Much? $15.00 per person plus ticket fee. $10.00 for Students with valid ID plus ticket fee. $20.00 at the door. (Ticket will include 2 raffle tickets)

AT&T Archives – Microworld

This is a fun historical film for AT&T.

Back in 1976, microprocessors had a maximum of 8.5K transistors for 64bits of memory. The Queen of England sent her first email, and Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I.
And a post-Star Trek but pre-TJ Hooker William Shatner made this film for AT&T about the future of microprocessors.
The chips were tiny at that time, to be sure, but paltry in terms of memory by today's standards. Yet Moore's Law had already been in effect for 11 years by this point, enough time to see that the future was going to be full of miniscule, powerful machines, even they weren't the predicted picturephones. Today's “microworld” is still getting smaller all the time.
This version of the film was slightly revised in 1980.
An Owen Murphy Production
Directed by Paul Cohen
Footage courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ

Canon Jumps on Thunderbolt

Just saw this on provideocoalition.com

Canon jumps on Thunderbolt
Steve Hullfish | 03/10
Canon first to jump on Apple Bandwagon

So, when Apple recently announced support for Thunderbolt the biggest question after the release by many in the video community was: “Who else is going to support this?”

The answer has come from a major player: Canon. This is a natural partner who can obviously utilize Thunderbolt’s 10Gbps port.

Thursday Canon announced that it would be coming out with at least one video camera that would use Intel’s Thunderbolt port.

According to Canon’s Hiroo Edakubo, “We are excited about Thunderbolt technology and feel it will bring new levels of performance and simplicity to the video creation market.”

Most of the players so far who have hinted at delivering products for Thunderbolt have been storage/hard drive related. Though AJA’s John Abt has teased on the Intel site: “Welcome to the future, Thunderbolt technology enables the fastest and simplest I/O for connecting AJA’s award-winning professional video capture and playback products to your laptop.” And BlackMagic’s Grant Petty also hinted, “Thunderbolt technology will revolutionize mobile media creation. It’s a game-changer and will accelerate our ability to build the highest quality video creation products that are affordable to everyone.”

If you’ve been living under a rock, or maybe haven’t given it your full attention quite yet, here’s the skinny on Thunderbolt so far:

Thunderbolt was originally code-named LightPeak and is an Intel technology that uses the same connection as the mini-display port on a Mac. It is designed for high-speed, dual-protocol (PCI Express and DisplayPort) I/O technology. Basically it’s the next step after USB3 and Firewire800, with the twist that it’s also a display protocol.

At 10 Gbps, Thunderbolt simultaneously delivers high-speed data and display transfers in each direction. At that rate, it is possible to transfer a full-length HD movie in less than 30 seconds or backup a year of continuous MP3 playback in just over 10 minutes. Cool, I was trying to figure out how to get my C-SPAN archive onto my MacBookPro.

Thunderbolt can be daisy-chained. Initially it will be released on Apple products as a copper-wire cable but will eventually utilize optical cables that will allow very long cable runs. The cable will allow power over the cable for bus-powered devices.

Thunderbolt is not just a cable and port. It transmits and receives packetized data – going both directions at the same time – with all the traffic handled by a controller chip in the computer and other external devices – like the newly announced Canon cameras. Intel is promising workstation performance expansion on a laptop. Obviously, with this type of throughput, the types of devices that will be able to benefit from this speed are things like hard drives, RAIDs, and probably IO devices like those by AJA and Blackmagic. This could also allow for “expansion chassis” type devices that will allow laptops to tap in to workstation-like power that was never before possible. For example, many people use workstations, including the MacPro towers, because they need the slots for graphics and video cards. Those cards could possibly sit in an expansion chassis or some kind of external device and be linked to a Thunderbolt-enabled laptop. Intel also claims that adapting existing I/O technologies, like GigE, FireWire or eSATA should be simple to do.

Beyond Canon and Apple, LaCie has also announced support for Thunderbolt. Others are sure to follow.

Apple and Intel’s Thunderbolt Could Revolutionize Portable Live Streaming Production

More good news for production people.

This an article from www.streamingmedia.com on the impact of Thunderbolt.

“For video mixing, however, the use of a laptop has been limited by both connectivity options and the processing required for HD production. The advent of Thunderbolt, along with the joint release of quad-core i7 processors in laptops, though, has enough throughput to allow multiple uncompressed HD streams to flow in to and out of the laptop. The potential for video mixing and streaming, plus external connectivity to multiple cameras and monitors can't be understated, given the throughput and multiple-protocol basis for Thunderbolt.”

Halfmac.info Blog has moved to frugalfilmmakers.com


Halfmac.info Blog has moved to frugalfilmmakers.com
This is the right place!
All future posts about filmmaking and photography have moved to frugalfilmmakers.com. We started this blog to feature exciting developments in those fields. Things are changing fast with HDSLR's, SLE's or mirrorless cameras and large sensor video cameras. Computers are moving quickly as well. We try to keep up and find bargains along the way. It is a brave new world and very exciting.
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