well anyways..
Floozy Engineers are hard at work attempting to make sense of comments in the new movabletype 3 universive. Its a slow road to understanding so just wing it until we get it fixed.
In other news, Avid Technology had a showcase next door down in the Pierre's Annex yesterday. Free food and drinks along with some sweet gear were on display. However, most of it, is highly out of my realm of usefullness. I dunno what I'd do with an HD uncompressed suite. But I did run into many old friends, folks I knew at Industrial Video, people I sold Toasters too, and several old clients of mine.
One guy reached across the table and shook my hand saying "you're dan rockwell, you sold me my first toaster!", another guy I used to sell avid's with said to me "aviddan we're you've been..." heh, many of them were curious if I was still editing. Of course I was! I will always have an Avid with me somewhere ya know and that toaster? Its in the garage! Ha. Speakin of the toaster, what the heck is OpenToaster all about? Could it be? OpenSource toaster action?
I sat in on a few of the demos. Avid pretty much has the same old hat here nothing astounding to see really. Its the same mixture of stream management, how many streams can i mix at once type of thing, ala realtime to boot. I suppose if update my Xpress DV to PRO DV ($299) I get tracks o rama, 24 tracks of audio, 8 tracks of video, whats that mean? If you use more than 8 tracks of audio or 4 tracks of video yer in the wrong solution, you might as well opt to spend 40k and go Adrenline and do it right. But PRO supposely gives u a feel.. or taste of it. Hardly really I didnt see the reason for it. Its pretty simple really you either go low end or you go high end. Nice thing is you can dabble in the high end at low end prices but to perform in high end, its a meager investment of 40k vs the once and mighty 150k.
One tool on the highend I liked was Avid's DS Nitris system. The Nitris came from the Softimage special effects line of performance stations. It was geared around doing battle against Discreets Fire, Smoke, products. When I first saw Nitris a few years back it was clunky, it couldnt decide whether it was a mac or a pc as for GUI and it was truly alien in thinking on its approach to basic editing and effects despite being utterly cool in its abilites. Now it has an Avid Composer interface to the edit model and the effects while still alien are more understandable. Throw in the fact that its HD serial digital uncompressed and well do the tango anyway you wanna go as far as simultanious streams both video and audio makes it for a sweet little gizmo. Tack on the paint, compositing and 3d abilties and its yeeehaw! What's the price Jimmy? Well a mere 145k for all the bells and whistles. But that is final finish production HD style. So if ya think about it.. ok stop thinkin about it. I'll have Grundy write up a nice break down of killer tools we can't afford but why we'd want them.
There's aspects of the old days of production I miss. I miss the pure simplicity of the DPS PAR card, and I miss the old toaster. Part of me will always keep at least a pinky or two tucked in the wedge of the door for "production" gear. Video production was my first love ya know.