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.

The Oculon Pocket Projector Pro 920 and 1440 are.. well.. actual pocket projectors. Available in December the tiny projectors pack 640×480 VGA for the 920 ($299) and 800×600 SVGA for the 1440 ($399), and literally fit in the palm of your hand. The 1440 sports both composite and VGA (D-SUB 15 pin) inputs connections, while the 920 supports only composite RCA. Both have optional SD card slots and Mpeg4 video playback - which could prove fun.

Obviously, there is a catch - or two. The specs on the product pages seem a bit inconsistent, with the 1440 mentioning 250 lumens (yes, two hundred and fifty), while the 950s spec only quoted at 25 (yes, two hundred and fifty divided by ten. That was not a typo on my part at least). The suggested throw at one meter being a diminutive 24 inches. Still, they could prove quite fun. Oculon mentioned a portable battery pack for the projector. Can anyone say head mounted projector?

Updated: the specs currently show 50 lumens for the 1440, as you can see on the product page. We received a correction via Ariel Chen from Oculon. Note that while that lumen level is relatively low for projection, there are still a number of applications for which this could be a really fun tool. -Ed.

I can. See the Oculon Pocket Projector homepage for more information.

This could be an very interesting option for VJ’s. Sony has updated the PSP line with some nice additions, slimmer (thus the PSP Slim moniker), longer battery life and decreased load times. But, we dont really care about those. What we care about is video output support:

Adding a video-out port(*1) enables new PSP users to experience high quality UMD(TM) (Universal Media Disc) Video, pictures and movies from Memory Stick Duo and game software titles(*2) on their TVs at home.

The current news is that the video output cable is sold separately, but will include composite, s-video and component. Thats great news. For those that don’t know, the PSP also allows users to transcode media and play movies off of a memory stick. This means the PSP can be used already for clip triggering - which might be a bit unwieldy at first. But with the PSPs strong homebrew scene, this could be a very interesting and fun option for those looking to differentiate their hardware setup. I can see a whole slew of games being turned into mixer fodder for parties, and homebrew that leverage the PSPs built in graphics hardware.

You can read more about the new PSP slim over at Kotaku - PSP Slim Coming in September.

Now all we need is a port of Rez for the PSP…