… and it’s a jaw-dropper.

Last week, Apple invited a few folks, including me, to a short meeting in Cupertino where they previewed the up-coming version of Final Cut Pro.

While I am under NDA and can’t talk about what I saw, I CAN tell you the meeting happened and that it showcased the new Final Cut Pro.

While the invited crowd was small, it was a Who’s Who of leaders in the post-production community. I felt like I was standing on the red carpet at an awards show, watching all the stars walk past.

There will be LOTS to talk about as this project gets closer. For now, I recommend you subscribe to my monthly Final Cut Studio newsletter – because I’ll share all the news that I’m allowed to share in there first.

Tell your friends … its gonna be a great year.

Larry

P.S. If you feel the urge to email me for more information, keep in mind that Apple’s lawyers are bigger than your lawyers. So, until Apple lifts the NDA, I’m telling you all I can … for now.

Apple today announced a series of minor updates to fix a variety of bugs in Final Cut Studio (3).

These improvements do NOT include full support for Snow Leopard, but do fix a variety of problems in Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Color 1.5, Compressor 3.5, and Apple QMaster.

My philosophy on bug fix updates is to wait a few days to make sure these didn’t break anything, then update.

You can view Apple’s announcement here: support.apple.com/kb/DL949

AppleInsider published a full list of the bug fixes here: www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/09/15/apple_updates_quicktime_for_windows_pro_applications.html

There are a variety of FCP fixes that I’m pleased to see, including the improved support for AVCHD, fixing the XML carriage return bug, and fixes to QMaster — a program that needs a LOT of improvements.

The easiest way to update – after waiting a bit, just to be “sure” – is using Software Update.

Larry

While HD Expo is in LA, I’m heading to Washington, DC, with the Digital Production BuZZ to cover the Government Video Technology Expo.

We’ll have highlights of the Expo on this week’s show, as well as additional hours of coverage starting Thursday this week.

If you are in the Washington area, take a few minutes and stop by the show. I’d enjoy the chance to say hi! We’re in the Walter Washington Expo Center.

I’ll be the guy wearing the headset talking with folks in Booth 356.

Click here to learn more about GV Expo.

Click here to learn more about The BuZZ.

You may have already noticed, but YouTube is now displaying all its videos in 16×9 format.

4×3 material is now displayed as pillar-boxed, and 16×9 material which was formerly displayed as letter-boxed is now both letter-boxed and pillar-boxed.

Thanks to Steve Martin for calling this to my attention.

(By the way, if you know the new image dimensions for submitting videos to YouTube, please let me know and I’ll share them here.)

Dave Walton is the assistant vice president for marketing and communications at JVC Professional Products. He is an expert in JVC’s video camera technology, as well as the overall broadcast market.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview him at DV Expo 2008 about JVC’s cameras, video formats, and future direction. While his interview is part of a larger show, I thought what he had to say was important enough to share with you directly.

I found it interesting that he worked hard to differentiate between the JVC ProHD brand and HDV, as well, his discussion on the variety of MPEG-2 formats and comments on the future of H.264 were also interesting.

(TRT: 21.54 10.3 MB)

You can hear the entire show here:

http://www.digitalproductionbuzz.com/Archives/LiveThatExpo.php?day1date=2008-11-05

Select Show #4.

I’ve been traveling around the country for the last two months, talking about the impact of tapeless and high-definition video on video editors.

Generally, I begin each session by talking about how “the world is moving to high-definition video” — except, after thinking and talking about this for a while, I no longer believe this is the best way to describe the environment that we are in. A better phrase is that video has become completely divergent. There is now a complete disconnect between how we capture our images (shooting) with how we distribute our images (viewing).

Here are three examples that illustrate our conundrum:

• High-definition video (HD) is all the rage in North America, but Europe seems quite happy with 16:9 standard-definition PAL.
• US networks can’t agree on one high-end distribution format for video, instead we have three: 720p (ABC, Fox, ESPN), 1080i (CBS, NBC, PBS), and the Digital Cinema standard.
• We shoot on HD yet distribute on mobile devices, such as cell phones or iPods.

Yes, the camera manufacturers would like us all to buy new cameras – and the easiest way to get us to do that is to convince us that everything needs the vastly improved clarity of a high-defintion image.

But that misses the bigger point.

What is unique about the times we are in today, I think, is that the format that we use to shoot our images has almost nothing to do with the way we distribute them. There is now a total disconnect between acquisition and distribution.

Some of the most popular ways of distributing a video — YouTube, Google Video, cell phones, iPods — have images which are FAR smaller than even standard definition video.

Adding to the confusion, when we create our video, we now need to convert it into a myriad of different formats, sizes, and resolution for distribution.

Here’s what I think this means for the future:

• How the video is compressed, it’s “codec,” and its scanning (progressive vs interlaced), is more important than image size
• The ease of converting your video from one format to another is more important than image size
• Planning how you intend to distribute your video needs to be done before you shoot
• The image size you shoot is increasingly less important as your final output size decreases

The world is a different place today than ten years ago when our choices were essentially limited to broadcast, cable, and DVD. Today, we need to work backwards: pick our distribution format, then pick the format you want to edit, then pick the format you want to shoot.

And there seems to be a complete disconnect between each of those three stages.

Let me know what you think.

As part of my weekly podcast – Digital Production BuZZ – I get to interview some truly interesting people. Sometimes, when I prerecord these interviews, I get more material than I can use for the show.

This was the case last night when I interviewed Rob Sheeley, President of Vaddio, a manufacturer and distributor of robotic cameras. When I was doing daily production, robotic cameras were large, clunky, VERY expensive, and not particularly useful.

However, when Rob told me that fully remote-controllable cameras could cost as little as $8,000, be put in places that a human operator could not work, and have a broadcast-quality image, I was very impressed.

Part of the interview that I needed to cut for time, though, was his description of the recent evolution of the industry, which I found very interesting. So, I thought I would post it here so you could listen to it as well.

Click here to play Rob Sheely’s soundbite. (TRT: 1:20 — 648 KB QuickTime file)

You can hear the entire interview, starting tonight, at www.digitalproductionbuzz.com.

The folks at NVidia invited the guys from MythBusters (Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage) to explain the differences between a CPU and a GPU.

NVidia also gave them an unlimited budget.

If you’ve been wondering what the difference is.. and want to see what true creativity can do when not restrained by such mundane things as common sense or budgets, check out this video.

While someone needs to teach NVidia how to compress video for the web — I mean 154 MB for a nine minute SD video would get any competent compressionist fired, the video is well worth watching if you have the time to download it.

Click here to view it.

IBC (the International Broadcasting Convention) in Amsterdam has been the source of a variety of exciting announcements that I want to bring to your attention. (Thanks to Ben King for doing the legwork and filing this report.)

First, Adobe continued it’s careful rollout of CS4 news by showcasing a speech to text conversion facility inside Soundbooth that literally transcribes the footage. Adobe’s rollout of the entire CS4 line next Tuesday looks increasingly exciting. (By the way, there are rumors going around the web that the CS4 announcements are pretty tame. I think, from a video point of view, that will not be the case. We shall see.)

Second, Apple announced native support for RED files in an upcoming version of Final Cut Pro. (Currently, RED files are transcoded into ProRes for editing.)  The report we have from IBC was that Apple said this update would be out in “the next couple of months.”

Third, JVC and Sony are partnering to jointly support XDCAM EX and SxS.  This is the first time someone other than Sony supported these formats. Could this be the beginning of both a video recording and storage format that producers could count on working the same between different camera vendors?  We’ve taken this for granted for years in standard-definition, only to discover that almost no HD formats – especially HDV – play nicely together.

Fourth, Ikonoscop launches the smallest HD camera which records in RAW images at full HD resolution.

Fifth, Digital Heaven announces Loader, a new application to make loading elements into Final Cut Pro easier.

Matrox is now, finally, shipping the MXO2 – an all-in-one, PCIe-connected box for capturing, monitoring, and outputting SD and HD signals.

CalDigit is shipping a new, high-performance RAID.

And a French company, called “Soft Lights,” is demoing studio lights that can be controlled from your computer. No more climbing ladders.

We’ll have a complete report from Ben King, Michael Horton, and Dan Berube in this week’s Digital Production BuZZ, and I’ll have an audio file of it posted to my website later in the week.  

Lots of fascinating things to come – life continues to be exciting!

The current issue of MacWorld (Oct. 2008 – www.macworld.com) has a lengthy article on computer security. While I agree with it, in general, one recommendation will cause problems for video editors.

First, the section on virus protection recommends that if you are running Windows on your Mac, you install and maintain virus protection software.  While if you are just running Mac OS X, virus software is not necessary.  I agree with this. In fact, running virus software on a video editing system will almost always cause dropped frames and other playback problems. 

Apple support documents recommend turning off any virus software before installing an application, as well as leaving it off for the duration of your video editing.

In another portion of the article, however, the author suggests using password encryption (Apple calls it “FileVault”) to protect the data in your Home directory. While keeping data secure is always a good idea, password-protecting your Home directory will cause problems with video editing, even if you set your Final Cut Pro scratch disks to a drive other than your boot disk.

The reason is that many applications write temporary files to your Home directory. However, when it is password-protected, the computer has to work harder to encrypt an decrypt these files. This slows everything down so that video doesn’t play smoothly in real-time.  

To avoid these problems, don’t use FileVault.