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Sony finally followed Panasonic’s lead by introducing a prosumer-level camera that records to a flash drive. But not just any flash drive, the XDCAM EX records high-def video directly to two ExpressCards. That’s good news for MacBook Pro owners as they’ll be able to pop the card into that snug slot and edit away.
Budding Spielbergs will marvel at the camera’s small size that can capture video at 1080i, 1080p, or 720p at variable frame rates. This means you can do graceful slow motion shots, or crank the speed way down to get some fast frenetic action. So when is this coolCam shipping, and at what price?
Sony’s PR guy told us the camera would ship later this year, probably in the fall, with a price somewhere in the neighborhood of $8000. Of course all of this is speculation at the moment, but the company’s Z1U camera retailed at that price when it was introduced three years ago. Sony was quick to point out the EX was not a replacement for the Z1U or the V1U but instead an intermediate camera between those two and the high-end HDC-950.
With its small size and solid state technology, just imagine how great the skateboard videos and shots of guys getting hit in the nuts will look on YouTube in high definition. –Stephen Schleicher
Today at the Panasonic event at NAB, the company let it be known that by the end of the year it will be shipping 32GB cards for its HPX500. Yeah it is a $14,000 dollar camera you don’t care about, but the announcement of the 32-gig card is a great road map to where the solid state technology is headed.
The 32GB cards will sell for around $1800, causing the current 16GB cards to drop to $900, the 8GB will fall to $700, and the 4GB cards will hover around $600. When laptop manufacturers adopt flash memory for their internal hard drives, $1800 is going to seem like an insane price to have for these cards that will allow you to record two hours of DVCPro video.
Take the jump for the really confusing price structure map delivered as only Panasonic can do it.
If you’re interested in high-end video production, you’ll want to take a look at Apple’s Final Cut Studio 2. It’s chock full o’ apps, included a smooth new update to Final Cut Pro, now in version 6, Its main coolness is its ability to crunch HDTV video down to manageable sizes, made possible by ProRes 422, a codec for compressing video that Apple claims to be able to do the video equivalent of stuffing a basketball through a garden hose.
We watched a lengthy demo of the new software, and found it to be a remarkable polyglot, able to handle all kinds of footage all in one big bucket, something that’s really important to broadcasters and filmmakers these days. When there are dozens of varieties of HDTV and regular TV to deal with, this is not a new feature, but welcome by Final Cut users.
Check out a few of our pics in the gallery below, and read more about Final Cut Studio 2 on the next page. galleryPost('apple_finalcut', 8, 'Apple Press Event');
Samsung’s CEO Yun Jong-yong said in a recent interview that they will be “very selective in choosing new markets” and have decided to forego the market for “the cheapest models,” generously leaving it to Nokia. Apparently, “cheap phones would not fit its brand image.” Instead, they want to sell “luxury versions” of cheap phones—wha? What exactly are “high low end products”? Contradictions. Exploding. Brain. –Matt Buchanan
Samsung aims for higher end of cheap phone mkt: CEO [Reuters]
The internet is now officially a place to pick up girls, since they outnumber guys on the internets in the US by over 6 million users. Of course, most of them look nothing like Scarlet Johansson, but we can’t all be picky. Apparently, only 66 percent of them have heard of YouTube, however. Of course, the more pertinent question is, “are any of you reading Giz?” –Matt Buchanan
More Women Online [eMarketer via Slashdot]
The “S-series” sounds like a product put out by a real corporation, but unfortunately this is just a concept from Simon Enever. We love his slider camera design and the non-gaudy implementation of wood. It screams, “I’m wealthy, tasteful and nautical—but your iPod is cute, really.”
Why do we tease you with products that aren’t real? Because we are cruel. –Mark Wilson
S-Series Cellphone [techeblog]
Apple’s Final Cut Studio 2 only has one actually, totally, new program. It’s called “Color”. Essentially described as advanced colour correction, I was confused as to why what sounded to be a pack of professional filters were being touted as their own program. Then I checked out the video on Apple’s site.
I grabbed a bunch of screencaps and posted them after the jump. The multi-pane interface allows for multiple colour graphs/scopes, along with what appear to be a multitude of timeline formatting options. I’m very interested in the ability to colour correct only parts of the image and sharing colour profiles among users with ease. Anyone spot interesting stuff?
The hardware part of the sermon is over, we believe. Right now, they’re going over Motion 3 video effects and faster hardware compression on the 8-Core Mac Pros. A 10-minute HD clip takes only 6 minutes to compress compared to 18 minutes in the previous version of the compressor. That’s about it. Nothing to get hypnotized by. More in a bit…oh wait, actually, we’re done….weird. No “One more thing.” –Brian Lam
Red One’s compatibility with Apple’s ProRes was a welcome surprise. There was some worry on our part, after the Red One camera delays, and after the prototypes were nearly lost to thieves last year. So we’re happy to see it taking off like this. Congrats to Ted Schilowitz, and his team.
To learn more about this 4k resolution super camcorder by the founder of Oakley glasses, read here.
And even though the pro cam is out of the range of most of our prices and needs, it can’t hurt to take a look at the rad hardware designs. –Brian Lam galleryPost('redone', 8, 'Red One'); Red One Camcorder [Gizmodo]
Apple introduced Open Format for Final Cut Pro, allowing you to mix different formats on the timeline. They say “it just works,” and from the demo, looks like all kinds of formats can nicely live together on the same editing timeline, where they had to be transcoded to work together before.
Then Apple showed some uncompressed 1080p footage with other resolutions and frame rates, all edited together in real time. Nice.
They then showed us a side-by-side comparison of ProRes and uncompressed HD, and it was hard to tell the difference between the two. Then the kicker? The ProRes footage was 10th-generation. Impressive.
