BlackMagic Design cards support Sony Vegas

In tandem with Sonys release of Vegas Pro version 9.0C, BlackMagic Designs is now
 supporting the software with its DeckLink HD Extreme (with 7.3.2 DeckLink drivers)!


Get the latest Sony Vegas software here
You can download the BlackMagic Design DeckLink 7.3.2 drivers here

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Planet C Produces Content for Universal Hollywood Horror Nights

If you've visited this years Hollywood Horror Nights at Universal Studios, Hollywood, much of the video content was produced by our client, Planet C Studios. Using a bevy of tools including Final Cut Pro, Media 100 and Avid, Mike Carone, the owner of Planet C, recently delivered the lion's share of the media elements for the studio. One of the highlights is the "Terror Tram" where guests are treated to an intimate encounter with Jigsaw from the Lionsgate Saw movie franchise. Good job, guys!

Visit Site - Planet C Studios

Media 100 now supports Blackmagic Designs

Media 100 now has pretty much every major capture card covered with their latest software update. Media 100 Suite v1.1 adds support for Blackmagic Design's Intensity Pro, DeckLink SDI, DeckLink Studio, and DeckLink HD Extreme video cards in addition to cards from AJA and Matrox.

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AJA Video Systems Ki Pro Review

Now that the $3,995 AJA Ki Pro is shipping, the reviews are starting to come in. One of the first, from Oliver Peters at DV.com is quite positive as he appreciates that he Ki was designed from an NLE standpoint and not a camera standpoint. The only downsides seem to be that it's geared for FCP editors and doesn't support codecs except Apple's ProRes, and the firmware is at 1.0, meaning there are still a few features that have yet to be enabled.

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Living Art - Magazines of the Future

Normally we don't get into photograpy as well, it involves still pictures and we're all about moving pictures. In this case, though, photographer Alexx Henry and his team show you how a magazine might look in the not-so-distant future with the October cover and spread for Outside Magazine. In this video, Alexx Henry takes you through the creation of the Living portrait of the triathlete Chris Lieto photographed using the revolutionary Red One cinema camera and the 5d Mark II.

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What you need to know about RAID

What is RAID? RAID is actually an acronym for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks," meaning that there are two or more disk drive that have been configured (striped) to behave as one drive. In the world of video, this allows for much faster read/write times than can be achieved using a single drive. How? Imagine that each drive has one 'scout' looking for information on that drive: if a drive is acting alone, it only has one 'scout,' however if it has been striped together with another drive (as a RAID array), there are now two 'scouts' out looking for the same information, allowing for the information to be retrieved twice as fast.

By striping more drives together, more speed is achieved. This is especially helpful with multiple streams of HD video, where the rule of thumb is that you should have a minimum of 200 MB per/sec read/write speed per stream to avoid having dropped frames. Typically, eight drives or more are striped together to achieve the desired throughput.

In the mid to late 1990's, nearly all drives were striped together using software (usually built in to the operating system). This 'software strip' is commonly referred to as RAID 0 (zero) and it allows all the drives to behave as one drive, achieving great data throughput. The down side to this type of striping is that if one drive fails, all media is lost. In a typical SCSI drive setup eight 36GB drives might have been striped together, so by having one drive fail you would lose 288GBs of media.

In the days of SCSI drives - the 1990s - their failure rate was quite good - usually one million hours mean time between failures; the downside was that SCSI drives were very expensive. Today, most video drive providers have moved to much cheaper SATA drives with much higher capacities. Unfortunately, SATA drives are not nearly as robust as the 'old' SCSI drives. This creates a potentially devastating problem: large amounts of media that have a greater likelihood for failure. Instead of the 36GB SCSI drives, today you might have eight one terabyte (TB) drives striped together; now when you have a drive failure you will lose all eight terabytes of data.

Many video editors are unaware of the dangers striping large SATA drives together using RAID 0. In today's tapeless workflow, where P2 and similar cards are off-loaded and then re-used, the media on your drives could be the only copy that exits: lose that media, and you have to re-shoot - usually not an option.

Protecting your media using RAID

Thankfully, there are other versions (usually referred to as levels) of RAID besides RAID 0 that can and will help you avert disaster. The key with the other levels of RAID is that they save what's called parity information on the drives. The parity information allows one (sometime two) drives to fail without losing the data (your media).

While there are several levels of RAID that use parity information, there are really only two that are appropriate for video editing - RAID 5 and RAID 6, as they tend to be able to handle the parity information and maintain a high data throughput necessary for video. If you would like to learn all about all levels of RAID, check it out on Wikipedia.

In short, both RAID 5 and RAID 6 put parity information on all drives that have been striped together, the difference being that RAID 5 can only handle one drive failure while RAID 6 can handle two drives failing. The upside to RAID 5 (and a reason that most editing drives are set up as RAID 5) is that the parity information takes up about the amount of space as one of your drives in the array. For example, an 8 drive system with 1TB drives, once striped as RAID 5, would end up with about 7TB of usable storage space. A RAID 6 setup using the same scenario would yield about 6TB of usable drive space.

What's needed for RAID 5 or RAID 6

Both RAID 5 and 6 require a controller to manage the data. The controller can either be in the drive chassis or on a card that goes in the computer. Some of the more sophisticated systems actually have dual controllers for even better performance. In either case, the controller is basically a computer managing the data, and to configure the drives there is either a separate software used or many systems have a network connection and are configured using a web browser. Many of the RAID controllers also offer an incredibly valuable feature: the ability to send out email alerts should a drive (or other component) fail. This can be especially handy for drive systems that are located in a machine room where a warning beep or light flashing may go un-noticed.

The cost of RAID 5 or 6

In the past, the cost for a protected RAID system was usually in excess of $5,000. Today, that cost has dropped significantly, with RAID 5 systems nearing the $1,000 mark. Ultimately, RAID 5 or RAID 6 is cheap insurance against the inevitable drive failure. Post-Op Video offers RAID solutions from Rorke Data, Sonnet Technologies, CalDigit, LaCie, G-Technologies and Editshare.

AJA moving offices; will be closed Oct 9th & 12th

Heads up to all those AJA owners out there - AJA is moving into new/expanded offices over the next few days and will be closed Oct 9th & 12th. Congrats on the new offices!

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RAID 5 solutions from Sonnet starting at under $1,335

Since 1986 Sonnet Technologies has pioneered innovative product solutions that enhance the storage, performance, and connectivity of Macintosh, PC, and industry-standard computers. There latest line of four drive RAID systems bring RAID 5 to a price level that anyone can afford.

The drives come in both desktop and rackmount configurations, are available in sizes from 2-6TB and offer a Quad Interface to the host system/workstation: eSATA, USB2, FW400, or FW800. For all the specs, click the read link below.

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Blackmagic Design cards and converters now in stock!

If you're looking for Blackmagic products we now have their top products in stock, including the DeckLink HD Extreme 3, the new DeckLink Studio 2, Intensity Pro, Analog to SDI and SDI to Analog converter boxes.

DeckLink HD Extreme 3
The ideal solution for connecting to any camera, deck or monitor, all with the same card. DeckLink HD Extreme is the first DeckLink card to feature both SDI and analog I/O, and HDMI connections that instantly switch between high definition and standard definition video. New DeckLink HD Extreme features 3 Gb/s SDI technology so you can connect RGB 4:4:4 and 2K via a single SDI connection, and an extra SDI out for Dual Link 4:4:4. Use with the latest PCI Express Mac and Windows computers for the world's highest quality editing, effects and broadcast paint solution.


Decklink Studio 2
The world's most compatible 10 bit video card that works in SD and HD! DeckLink Studio includes SDI, HDMI and analog video, analog and digital audio, keying in SD, a hardware down converter all in a compact and incredibly low cost solution that's perfect for broadcast editing, paint and design. DeckLink Studio supports both SD and HD and plugs into any PCI Express Windows or Intel-based Mac Pro computer. DeckLink Studio includes SD/HD-SDI, SD/HD component, composite, S-Video, 4 ch balanced analog audio, 2 ch AES/EBU, blackburst and tri-sync reference input and RS-422 deck control connections.

Intensity Pro
Add the incredible quality of HDMI to your computer. Intensity features the latest HDMI technology for the highest quality capture and playback on Windows or Mac OS X computers. Now you can edit using big-screen HDMI televisions and video projectors, or capture uncompressed quality from HDV cameras.

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Matrox Releases Support for Snow Leopard

Matrox announced today that version 1.7 software is now live on their site for the Matrox MXO2 family of I/O devices and the Matrox CompressHD H.264 accelerator card. The software implements 32- and 64-bit support for the new MAC OS X v10.6 - Snow Leopard.

Release 1.7 provides the following new features for the Matrox MXO2 family:
NEW Matrox MXO2, MXO2 Rack, MXO2 Mini functionality:

• Support for Apple Snow Leopard.
• Increased stability and performance

NEW Matrox MAX functionality:

• Support for Apple Snow Leopard.
• Supports web streaming (fast start) when encoding Matrox MAX H.264 files for QuickTime in Apple Compressor.

Release 1.7 provides the following new features for Matrox CompressHD:

• Support for Apple Snow Leopard.
• Supports web streaming (fast start) when encoding Matrox MAX H.264 files for QuickTime in Apple Compressor.

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Ground-breaking 3D Video Stabilization - who needs a Steadicam?

We have to admit, we missed this one from Siggraph 2009 back in August, and potentially it's looks to be a game changer for video stabilization. Yes, we said 'game changer' and we don't toss that around lightly. So what's the big deal? Most video stabilizers - either built-in to a camera or software that renders out a stabilized image, usually takes away some of the jerkiness of a hand held camera but it in no way will give you the look of a professional dolly move or a good Steadicam operator.

Rather than using 'simple' 2D algorithms to do their stabilization, the folks over at the Computer Sciences Department of University of Wisconsin-Madison are using 3D algorithms that they make sound so simple: "Our technique first recovers the original 3D camera motion and a sparse set of 3D, static scene points using an off-the-shelf structure-from-motion system. Then, a desired camera path is computed either automatically (e.g., by fitting a linear or quadratic path) or interactively. Finally, our technique performs a least-squares optimization that computes a spatially-varying warp from each input video frame into an output frame. The warp is computed to both follow the sparse displacements suggested by the recovered 3D structure, and avoid deforming the content in the video frame."

So simple, why didn't we think of that! Click the read link below for all the details and more videos - truly something that has to be seen to be appreciated.


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