P2 Workflow Workshop in Dallas, Jan 7-8

HD Expo is hosting a 2-day workshop for all things P2 related at MPS Studios in Dallas on Jan 7th and 8th.

they're gonna go over:
-The P2 media format
-Compression formats
-All about AVC-Intra
-The P2 file tree
-Ins and outs of all cameras, decks and support devices
-P2 Support Utilities
-Production workflow on productions with small to large budgets
-Working with P2 in short to long format productions
-In-depth editing overview
-Complete workflow demonstration from acquisition to edit
-Hands on the latest P2 cameras
-Different options for different shooting scenarios
-Posting with P2

should be lots of good info for people new to P2 and also people who use P2 and may be looking at getting into AVC-Intra.

Register Here

Film Calculator Widget for Mac users

Film Source LA is a new Raw Stock Company established to take over the short end business from Dr. Rawstock, which became a video VAR called The Dr. Group. I've ordered short ends from Dr. Rawstock in the past and their quality and service were always top notch, so I hope that Film Source lives up to their goals and continues to offer this service. As many know, short ends for 16mm and 35mm film enable super low budget films to be able to shoot on film in cases where they'd otherwise be looking at DV or HDV. For example, you can get a new 400ft can of 35mm Kodak 500T for about $230. 400ft of short ends will cost around $60. Its not quite as dramatic for 16mm, but its still cheap enough to make film shooting possible for filmmakers who normally assume that its way out of their price range.

In order to help with budgeting and shooting ratios, Film Source recently put a Film Calculator widget up for download on their site. You can calculate run times from single 8mm all the way up to IMAX.

download it here

Combustion 2008 released a few weeks ago

You might have missed this one, but Autodesk quietly released a long awaited update to Combustion in early December. Continuing with their John Madden video game style naming conventions, they've dubbed it 'Combustion 2008'.

Many folks in the compositing field had deemed Combustion to be a dead product. Autodesk was barely releasing bug fixes on Combustion 4, and getting anyone at HQ to help set up upgrades or support contracts was almost impossible. Assumptions were that Combustion would be EOL'ed and that the more powerful (and profitable) TOXIK would take its place.

So, it was a small suprise that an update did occur, but Combustion users wont really see much of an upgrade. The biggest enhancement is the inclusion of the high end Color Warper operator, which is a feature that users of Flame & Inferno have been used to. The app is still 32-bit based for XP, and certified for 10.4 on Mac. No word on 10.5 updates yet. Toxik, on the other hand, can run on 64-bit XP and also Linux OS's. There has been no announcement for Toxik on Mac as of yet.

more info on Combustion 2008 here

more info on Toxik 2008 here

LACIE Rugged Drive survives Fire

not sure if this is a publicity stunt or not, but this pic shows a Lacie Rugged Bus powered drive surviving a car fire. The driver reported that the drive spun up with no problems and he was able to recover his data.

These little Rugged's have been popular in the P2 world for field dumping MXF files. They have USB, FW400 and FW800 and can be powered via bus power. (perfect companion for the P2 Gear, which requires a USB Bus powered drive if you want to operate completly off of battery power)

Avid finally hires a CEO!

About 6 months after the "retirement" of former CEO David Krall, Avid has hired a new CEO. Gary Greenfield is new to the TV/Film industry having spent recent time as owner of Francisco Partners, a technology-focused private equity firm. Greenfield will apparently get a $900K a year salary, plus a $600,000 signing bonus. (Isn't public company information fun!)

a little further research into Francisco Partners indicates that they are
"the world's largest technology-focused buyout fund". So, the question is: has Greenfield been hired to orchestrate a sale to another company? Harris seems be a likely candidate as they have been buying companies left and right recently, plus they have virtually no current presence in the NLE market.

new Sony EX Cams have vignetting problems

75-80% of initial users are reporting various degrees of a vignette on the top corners of their image. This may be an issue of Sony shipping faulty products while trying too hard to meet a ship date.

see this thread up on DV INFO

also, keep in mind that initial NLE compatibility with this camera is still rough (Avid? Premiere?)

Users looking for a ready-to-roll, full quality 4:2:2 camera with established industry compatibility might wanna stick with P2 for awhile.

DULCE DQ RAID is smokin fast!

I'm setting up a FCP/Adobe/Mac Pro system for a client and he's getting the new DULCE DQ 8-bay PCIE RAID which is advertised to run at about 570MB/s in RAID 5. Well, upon setup and Blackmagic bench test, the unit does indeed run that fast.

The second test we did was to capture about 100GB of uncompressed 10-bit 1080 at 60i. FCP with the Dulce can play back 3 simultaneous streams of this codec w/o a choke!

The new Blackmagic 6.2.2 drivers are built for FCP 6 and Premiere Pro 3.1 and there are now project presets for Blackmagic within Premiere. The drivers work flawlessly on FCP, but I think Blackmagic still has some work to do on the Premiere Drivers. They seem a bit buggy at this point.