During the high-definition wars, your feelings about new higher-capacity storage discs may have ranged from ambivalence to dread to simple disinterest. (Well, that’s how I felt, anyway.) But with Blu-ray triumphant comes this realization: "hey, brain, we’ve suddenly got increasingly-affordable ways of burning high-capacity media!" Drive upgrades on the PC side cost what DVD burners once did, and if you’re hooked up to a TV, the writer can be your player, too. (There’s already a Lite-On internal drive for around US$350, and I expect these prices will plummet as production ramps up.)

That’s burning, anyway — authoring is obviously essential.

LUX from Richard Lainhart on Vimeo.

Our friend Richard Lainhart sends this lovely "swirly thing" (to use technical terms). His description:

An abstract HD film animated in After Effects. The soundtrack, "The Beautiful Blue Sky", is a realtime electronic synthesizer improvisation for Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum.

My description:

Mmmm…

Oh, sorry. Forgot what I was saying: staring into swirly thing. Hey, it’s the weekend. Enjoy!

Quite a few of you raised an eyebrow when we topped our gift guide with the Canon HV20, an affordable (as little as us$700) HDV camcorder. Like the New England Patriots (that’s American football for the rest of the world), the Canon HV20 appears to be largely unbeaten as the best-available visualist-friendly camera. It’s small, it’s light, it’s cheap, it does HDV, ’nuff said. It’s also eminently upgrade-friendly, with indie producers adding 35mm lenses and nifty accessories. And even those of you with larger, more powerful cameras occasionally want something you can toss in a backpack or use as a backup.

But that got me wondering — is the HV20 really One Camera to Rule Them All?

I have a couple of candidates I think could be interesting.

The big rival as far as HDV appears to be Sony. The HDR-HC7, for instance, has more sophisticated manual controls than the HV20, and I like Sony’s night-shot mode for extreme infrared applications. It’s also a little heftier than the Canon, in a good way — it’s a camera I find comfortable to hold. cnet even likes the Sony better than the HV20. (camcorderinfo.com begs to differ; see their link below) Like many things in life, it looks even cooler in Japanese.

Unfortunately, "manual control" on a consumer-level Sony means navigating the horrible touch screen interface, and worse yet the HDR-HC7 introduces a bizarre new manual focus multi-function control. (Translation: some strange add-on bit of plastic that’s utterly useless for controlling anything.) All that said, I do like Sony’s cameras, despite their quirks.

Here’s the problem: the HDR-HC7 is running a street of over $1100, while the HV20 is well below $800. Is the Sony $300 better than the Canon? (Heck, is the Sony better than the Canon, period?) Tough to justify, I think.

Cineform last week announced a concept video recorder which may (ok, lets be honest, WILL) prove to be incredibly useful to the VJ market.

The Cineform Direct to Disk recorder looks mightily impressive - with HDMI input and passthrough, audio input, and an incredibly small for factor (think Mac Mini but 1/3 the height), it can record to either Quicktime MOV or AVI with full raster 720 or 1080 HD resolution, at YUV 4:2:2 10 bit (this is huge!), at all your normal video framerates - from varicam 23.976 up to 59.94 progressive and anything in between. The Cineform Recorder writes data to either dual CFCards or laptop harddrive - with a speculated 3 hour record time with the hard drive.

Use a DVI to HDMI converter and record your set straight out of your computers DVI-D port, and with the HDMI passthrough, you can drop it in line to the projector, you wont even need a splitter/ or DA.

While the product is not available yet, Cineform speculates on a whole family of Direct to Disk recorders - some more Pro than others (think timecode, HD-SDI options, etc). Even if they only make one product, its sure to be a hit - even at the speculated sub $2000 price point.

Check out CineForm Recorder for full specs and info.

Via HD4NDs.

Today on the VJ-U netcast we’ll be interviewing Aleksej, director of Circus of Now, a large-scale multimedia event design company. Among other things, we’ll discuss their Intelligent Media Composer, a polymorphic HD projection system that can dynamically mix timelines of pre-produced content with live feeds. Join us in the studio to ask questions or watch in the player below.

Nov. 6, 2007, 5 PM EST - Big visuals for big events: the Circus of Now (interview)

Since my last little slow motion test I’ve had plenty of quality time with my HVR-V1P, and while I wish it had a slightly more memorable model name - or even that it was printed somewhere on the unit, so I can tell people what it is when asked - I’m having a great time with this camera, enjoying the capabilities HD resolution gives me, and still loving Sony’s Smooth Slow Record feature.

With the last batch of slow-mo clips I had some requests to further slow down the motion in post-processing. I don’t currently have any 3rd party retiming plugins, but it turns out that the 200FPS (240 for NTSC regions) is shot interlaced, so my previous tests were only displaying 100FPS progressive. To get the full motion from 200FPS on a progressive monitor I needed to slow the footage to 50% speed and de-interlace, a trivial task in any editor.

Butterfly Slow-Motion 200FPS

Even this low-tech retiming gives you an idea of how powerful 200FPS can be. I actually had an ND filter in place to keep the shutter speed relatively low and keep a bit of a dreamy look for this shoot (the minimum allowed, of course, being faster than 1/200). With full sunlight you’d have no trouble getting up past 1/1000, which would result in very little motion blur and allow very accurate motion tracking, and some exciting retiming opportunities.

”

Mike from HD for Indies with the Red One overlooking New York City

The Red camera is in the wild, and apparently the revolution wont be televised, it will be filmed, at 4096×2048 @ 24FPS. Here is a quick link roundup from the interwebs.

• FX Guides Red One launch coverage
• 4K stills and video from HD4NDS - with stuntcars!
• Extended 4K stills Gallery - HD4NDS
• 3D stereoscopic tapeless workflow at 4K with Red One - Studio Daily

I downloaded a few of the 4K still frames. They weigh in at 48MB uncompressed tiffs, and the result is astounding. Ive seen uncompressed HD and 2K on professional broadcast monitors and projectors, but I can’t imagine seeing this at native resolution in full motion. Lets let that last link sink in on you. I am insanely jealous.