Avid, makers of a wide range of digital video/audio software and hardware have a couple of new product updates coming your way mid-September. The first to note is an updated version of their consumer-friendly family of products know as Pinnacle Studio.
The new Pinnacle Studio meets the needs of a wide range of consumers, from novices to video enthusiasts and semi-professionals. The family of products includes Pinnacle Studio HD, Pinnacle Studio Ultimate and Pinnacle Studio Ultimate Collection, which offer a complete HDV & AVCHD workflow and allows consumers to export movies to Flash, QuickTime, PS3, Nintendo Wii, Xbox, Apple iPod and more. Pinnacle Studio Ultimate and Pinnacle Ultimate Collection also offer Blu-ray authoring with motion menus.
Other new features include:
- A stop-motion capture for animated and fast-motion effects.
- New content and enhancements for Pinnacle Montage.
- Dynamic Motion Titler tool that includes a number of new templates.
- A new stabilizer effect – leveraging the same technology used in Avid’s professional editing products to fix shaky camera shots.
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I’ve been testing an HD projector here at the house and, in its initial, out-of-the-box setting we found that the picture was ridiculously “sharp.” The picture, I suppose, looked like an old Dr. Who episode where the action on screen is smoother than the background, creating a jarring disparity when watching movies with lots of movement. It’s sometimes called the “Soap Opera Effect.” We decided to do a little digging to figure out why.
Most film is recorded at 24 frames per second, but your LCD TV probably either displays at 60 fps or 120 hz (hertz is just a measurement of frequency per second). There are three main ways to cope with this.
If money is no issue, and you’re looking to play 1080p content—alt.binaries.hdtv.h264 says hi—on your big screen TV, you really ought to look into getting a proper PC, one with one of those fancy nVidia GPU that you can use to hardware accelerate said Blu-ray rips. That being said, it looks like LaCie just came out with a stand-alone device that should play most of the HD content you “find” online. Oh, it’s called the LaCinema Rugged HD, and LaCie wants $350 for it.
Today in Korea, Samsung announced an eco-friendly full HD LED monitor, the XL2370. It’s said to have a “finger-slim” design, but the press release makes no mention of how thick it actually is. But we do know that the XL2370 has a “mega dynamic” contrast ratio of 5M:1, 2ms response time and 1920×1080 resolution. Oh, and it has “Starlight Touch Controls.”
For all the fluff that generally pours out of Brando’s website, there’s always a diamond in the rough here and there. This one seems to be more diamond than rough. It’s basically an adapter that turns any 3.5- or 2.5-inch hard drive into an HD video player for your TV. It’ll also push out files from SD cards and USB thumb drives as well.
Thanks to VholdR you can now record your daredevil shenanigans in HD (720p). Like the original VholdR, the ContourHD can be strapped to your helmet or goggles (weighs only 4 ounces) and the water resistant anodized aluminum body ensure it can take a tumble or two. You can record up to eight hours of HD footage at 30fps onto a 16GB microSD card or 16 hours of SD footage at 60fps.
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Some Sunday morning rumor mongering for y’all. While we’ve known that Amazon has been planning to sell HD versions of TV shows for a few weeks now, we knew nothing about price… until now! Yup, it looks like Amazon wants $2.99 per HD episode, as this screengrab shows, which is the same prices that Apple charges on iTunes. (That works out to around $53 per season, which, knowing the quality of TV these days, is an insane proposition.) But, good news for Apple haters, then
Attention Vudu owners-
You now have the privilege of downloading and owning HD movies from an on demand online distributor. There are roughly 50 titles that you can download in both HD and HDX. Magnolia, Kino and FirstLook are among the indie studios who have films available at the moment including “Man on Wire.”
CSI helped defined HD in its early years and now it will finally be available on Blu-ray. The show, along with ER, was one of the first primetime programs to showcase why the 16:9 format at a higher definition was so damn spectacular. I don’t even think CSI: Miami would still be on the air if it wasn’t for the HD eye candy compensating for the horrendous acting. Anyway, the show’s first season should hit shelves on May 12 for a yet to be announced price. Now, lets see some more HD shows hit the Blu-ray format starting with BSG, The Office, and ER.
The Simpsons has been a staple in many homes for nearly 20 years and finally, finally, the show will be broadcast in glorious high definition. Season 20 debuts on February 15 which is when the switch will be flipped and we’ll see Homer and Co. in HD. Plus, the show is going to have a new main title for the first time in 20 seasons. Oh, and for the record, The Simpsons is going HD before the earlier announced South Park high-def debut. Natch. So what cartoon is next? Family Guy? King of the Hill? I vote King of the Hill.
Sanyo’s compact line of Xacti Dual camcorders was refreshed this morning with five new models. The high-end DMX-HD2000 and DMX-FH11 are the only two that shoot 1080p resolution video. Like Xactis before it, these two also take still photos that are approximately 8 megapixels even when recording video. They can be interpolated up to 12 megapixels as well when not shooting video. Both have a 10x optical zoom.
Update: We now have pricing. Hit the jump.
Samsung just released 6 new camcorder models the HMX-H100, HMX-H104, HMX-H105 and HMX-H106 HD cams, SMX-F34 YouTube cam and the HMX-R10 CMOS-based HD camcorder.
I am wondering if this news will ever be of significance but here we go: The Nikkei, Japan’s largest business newspaper, is reporting today that Panasonic has set a new standard for Blu-rays that are capable of reproducing 3D images in HD (the picture above shows an older Panasonic plasma 3D TV).
For months now, I have been trying to play .MKV and other video files on my living room front projector. At first I tried to connect a laptop directly to the TV. But this didn’t always work, the audio was crappy, and it was awkward to have a laptop connected to the projector.
I started using my XBOX 360 to play video files. At first I wanted to stream the files across my network. This worked every once in a while, but mostly it was an exercise in frustration. And I got miserable fast forward and rewind capability because of the network bottleneck.
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Creative introduced today the Vado HD, the successor to the Vado released back in May. It captures video in 720p and is the only pocket video cam to feature HDMI connectivity and an included HDMI cable that provides 1080i output to an HDTV. It also comes with 8GB of built-in memory that can hold up to two hours of HD video. The Vado HD also features a 2-inch LCD screen and a built-in USB connector so you can quickly connect to your PC and share your videos using YouTube or Box.net.
Grab this thin, lightweight cam on sale in carbon black at Amazon.com and Creative’s website for $199 with free shipping from both stores.
Here’s the little brother of the TV deal we posted yesterday. Yes, it’s a Dynex and yes, former Geek Squad employee Alex commented in the previous post that he found the Dynex brand of TVs to not only be “GARBAGE!!!” but also “PURE GARBAGE!!” – all caps and five total exclamation points.
However, both the 42-inch TV and this 26-inch TV have gotten around 4.5 out of 5 stars by their owners, which seems to indicate that Dynex fixed what was wrong with earlier units or 125+ reviewers got extremely lucky. Either way, hooray for cheap TVs!
Dynex 26-inch 720p Widescreen Flat-Panel LCD HDTV [Best Buy]
The tiny-and-popular line of Flip Mino camcorders has a new addition with the MinoHD. It’s basically a Flip Mino that – you guessed it – records at 1280 x 720 resolution onto four gigabytes of onboard memory. The camera appears to be about the same as the regular Mino except for some updated software, the higher resolution, the 4GB of storage, and the $229.99 price tag versus the standard Mino at $179.99.
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Just what every housewife has been asking for, Regis and Kelly is going high definition on January 5th, 2009. I doubt the world will be a better place once the forever-young Regis will be seen in all the detail that HD provides, but still, it’s great seeing staple morning shows making the switch. More and more consumers are going to purchase HDTVs with the digital switch looming and there is nothing worse than watching your shows that are not high-def on your beautiful new HDTV.
So my wife wants to know…when is Martha Stewart going HD?
Vudu’s HD catalog is officially the largest available from any service and even surpasses physical media. In the month of October Vudu added over 150 HD titles per week to reach this historical milestone. Their recently announced HDX service now has over 150 titles as well.
Today, they added 35 HDX titles and 398 HD titles, which we’ve listed after the jump in alphabetical order because we love you! Read More
Sound & Vision has a list of what they feel are the top high definition shows this fall.
- CSI: Miami
- Pushing Daisies
- The Mentalist
- Heros
- True Blood
- The Office
- Dexter
While I don’t disagree with first two, Dexter (best show on TV, btw) and True Blood should be higher on the list. Plus SNL, Stargate: Atlantis, and ER all better looking than The Office. Great show, but there are better eye candy shows out there. Any others?
