Edirol has announced a new field converter and updates to their field recorder line. The idea: manage SD and HD content on the road, live, recording and converting to whatever you need. I can imagine this could provide some serious power for the pro, gigging visualist.

The new VC-50HD provides bi-directional conversion between SD/HD-SDI to and from DV and HDV and MPEG-2. That means you can capture video easily in HD or HDV, backup videos, archive live performances, record to Blu-ray – whatever.

The F-1 field recorder, now updated to version 2.0, is even tastier. It does for video recording what Edirol’s well-liked mobile audio recorders to for sound. You can now capture video at selected periods, automatically deleting old files as you hit capacity, record loops, mark time, and record directly onto removable hard drives in HDV or DV. FireWire and such are onboard, plus two channels of balanced audio. I can see just racking this sucker up in a live concert situation and rocking out. You can even remote control it via LAN, review clips on the unit, adjust RGB directly … replace “field” with “touring” and I think you’ll see what I mean, especially with the added recording features. There’s even a solid state option.

The units aren’t cheap, of course, but if you can’t budget for them now, you can file them away as gear-to-ask-for-money-to-buy on the right gig.

Doing live visuals and other projects means sometimes endless conversion and editing tasks, but many of the dedicated tools for the job are just too much. I’ve been playing around with Video Converter from Extensoft, which is about perfect I think in terms of what you most often need to do. It’s an ideal companion to a full-blown video editor like Premiere, and now it’s also been made free. Windows-only.

Features:

• Import AVI, FLV, MOV, MP4, MPG, QT, WMV, more
• Export to AVI, MP4, MPEG1 and MPEG2, QT, WMV, H.264
• Export directly to FLV with the Flash player ready to go
• Merge, split, scale, deinterlace, change frames per second
• Basic editing and selection timeline
• Batch conversion
• Predefined settings for YouTube, iPod, iPhone, etc.
• Save projects and presets

The combination of the slicing and dicing tools with batch conversion and deinterlacing to me is just brilliant, and replaces QuickTime Pro for me on some of these tasks.

Free Video Converter @ Extensoft

I actually like the premium suite this is part of, so I may wind up buying the whole thing.

Any preferred tools you’ve got on Windows, Mac, or Linux?

MediaCoder is a free do-everything, convert-everything audio and video batch processor. It relies on tools like ffmpeg behind the scenes, but supports multiple engines, lots of formats, and has a graphical front end. It works on Windows, and could be a good reason to virtualize Windows on Mac or Linux, and it also evidently works pretty well on Mac and Linux via WINE. (Haven’t tried that yet; see the download page for details.)

The best news from MediaCoder land is that a recent build has added support for AVCHD, the widely-used HD format. This is essential for those times you get media off someone’s hard drive-based player. The MediaCoder folks have a brief tutorial with screenshots on their site:

How to convert AVCHD with MediaCoder

If you have a preferred conversion method for AVCHD or other formats on your platform of choice, let us know. In the meantime, I’m finding I fire up MediaCoder almost every day.