Mike Una has written up a fantastic mini-tutorial on how to make your own mic flag — that is, the little oldskool decorations broadcasters put on their mics. (Well, anyway, the oldskool ones looked coolest.) This one seemed a bit better-suited to createdigitalmusic.com, so it’s over there, but imagine it may interest some of you doing your own video production — or get someone to interview you as the VJ superstar you are.

How to Build a Mic Flag and Look Like a Real Broadcaster

Image: Bob Gowa at the wonderful vintagemicflags.com.

Pinnacle’s new Video Transfer box is a portable analog video (S-video/Y-c and composite) and stereo audio (RCA) h.264 encoder. The Video Transfer box has no built in storage - you supply it. Touting iPod video compatibility and USB Mass storage support, you can in theory hook up any USB 2.0 device to record video to.

With selectable quality (Good, Better, Best - sound familiar?), the Video Transfer supports iPod Video, Nano (third gen) and iPod Classic, as well as the PSP and PSP Slim, USB 2.0 flash drives and USB 2.0 hard drives. I’m guessing no Touch/iPhone support due to the lack of USB Disk Mode. ‘Tis a shame. Ed.: That likely knocks out Zune and a few other devices, as well — if you’re listening, oh device manufacturers, we really, really, really prefer to buy devices with this feature!

Grab a nice big, cheap, old USB 2.0 and route S-Video off of the back of your Edirol V4 mixer and have instant hour-long, high-quality web and PMP ready gig recordings. Sounds perfect.

The best news? It’s coming January 15th for only US$129.99. Awesome.

Via Engadget, and Macworld.com.

Now, what to do about the other end? How about a 500GB - 1TB LaCie external hard drive with composite / S-Video / component video output? You’ll never need a DVD player hooked up to your mixer again.

LaCie’s LaCinema Premier external HDD surfaces [Engadget]

Once commercial software, a powerful audio/video editor is
now still supported, but at a new price of — nada. Our friends at Samplepoolz report that Arboretum has turned HyperEngine-AV into a free download. Better yet, the code is open source, so we could see some exciting developments with this program. (Programmers out there?)

HyperEngine-AV is a compositing application for text, video and audio.
As opposed to more rigid track-based programs, you can composite clips
wherever you want via a freeform interface. If you're in need of a
video editor and your budget is tight, this is a must-have, but there
are some good reasons to get it for audio, too. You can record or
import both video and audio, making HyperEngine an effective
multichannel audio editor. You have to pay for most of the audio effect
plugins, but a number of useful plugins from ring mod to hall reverb
are included free.

There are features missing — no standard VST/AU plugin support, for instance
– but this could be useful to many people, and it's really nice to see
software being released free with full tech support and an open-source codebase rather than being killed.
(Cough, Opcode/Gibson, cough!)

Download for Mac OS X. (11 MB)
OS X's built-in ZIP support doesn't work for me — try StuffIt Expander, which works fine. -PK