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.

Sure, the name of the site may be Create Digital Motion, but don’t get me wrong — we know digital is evil. Or, specifically, digital gets real evil at certain times. There are the latency-inducing, problem-causing HDMI cables when VGA or S-Video or Composite would do the job, the “look at our brand, new storage format” trend that turns out to be “look at the hideously onerous, new copy protection method we’ve just invented.”

We know a little bit of our soul died when we brought in all this digital tech to our work. (Happy side note, though: my eyes now glow red. It’s totally awesome at parties.) So, we now proudly present The Battle for Analog, a completely nonsensical look at the analog world we might leave behind. (Well, unless you carry some mobile VHS decks to a gig, which could be a great idea … a little magnetic distortion live, anyone?)

And to kick things off, we’ve got a look back at VHS’ stand against the puppy-killing DVD, via our friends at the All Retro, All The Time, Retro Thing. So, at the risk of “boneheaded nostalgia” as someone described this in comments on RT, I present this mock VHS PSA from musclebeaver, with music from the Transformers music proudly playing in the background:

And, uh, yeah, it does appear to have been crafted in After Effects. Where is that Export to VHS option in CS3, anyway?

PS - I think Blu-Ray winning out over HD-DVD is finally Sony’s revenge for losing on superior Betamax.

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]

DVGuru have reminded me about something on my projects list which really should be assigned a higher priority: Networked storage. Australian Tech Blogger of Uberness Dan has touched on this in the past and a more recent article which includes a magic list of NAS devices which allow drive spin-down. This is critical; a consumer hard drive left turned on 24/7 (which is likely for a NAS) will have its live expectancy drastically reduced if the device doesn’t power down the drive when not in use. The Mapower device from the Automated Home article does include customizable spin-down. Dan’s original pick is the Netgear SC101 Storage Central, which has spin-down via a firmware update, accepts up to 2 drives and costs under US$100. It’s PC only though, and the reviews aren’t particularly positive (Requires proprietary software to access the data? Yuck!) so hunting down one of the other options may be worthwhile. Amazon shows a resonable selection.

Personally, I already have a webserver/media server/bittorrent machine which runs 24/7. So I’m going to drop my NAS budget on a gigabit ethernet card, gigabit switch, and a couple of hefty drives.