Video News

Archive for June, 2006

Celtx releases pre-production tools for Windows OSX and Linux

by | June 29th, 2006


reprinted from Celtx

Celtx is Pre-Production software for film, video, theatre, and animation.

Use the Celtx Scene Details and Character Background forms to create dynamic story lines. Add sound files, pictures and video clips to help create a media rich Outline.

Celtx has a full industry standard screenplay editor that includes all of the features writers need to keep their fingers moving, like intuitive formatting, text auto-complete, pagination, script styles, CAPS selection, scene management, spellchecker, embedded notes, find and replace, PDF generation and other export options.

Celtx also supports writing plain text documents – so you can write a poem, music lyrics, or your complete Novel.

Complete a media rich breakdown of your project, tagging key items like props, and actors and special effects with notes and pictures and even sound files to help give shape to your Story.

Use the built in Calendar and Reports features to keep your Project organized and to help keep track of any production requirements by scene or character or dialogue or action or any number of other ways that Celtx makes possible.

Celtx has a secure, built in Collaboration feature that lets you share your entire Project – scripts, breakdown files, budgets, schedules, location forms etc. – with team members.

Use the Celtx Collaboration feature to help keep track of their progress and to maintain a common vision among your team.

Publish your Project to Project Central where others can view your Project and provide feedback.

http://www.celtx.com/index.html

ZVUE.com now offers downloadable videos

by | June 28th, 2006


from a Handheld Entertainment press release
<

SAN FRANCISCO - June 28, 2006 - HandHeld Entertainment today announced it has launched its new ZVUE.com video download store with easier navigation, a clean new design and a growing library of downloadable videos available for purchase or for free with more being added each week.

HandHeld Entertainment now has under contract more than 10,000 music videos, anime movies, cartoons, independent films, documentaries, news, entertainment and sports programs and other forms of video content from companies like Canadian Broadcast Corp., ADV Films, IMG, Worldvision Cinema, Fun Little Movies, Sunflower Entertainment, StoryPIPE and others.
These videos (and more) will be added to the site during the next 12 months.

The ZVUE.com videos are available for purchase and can be downloaded by owners of the ZVUE or by owners of any other PVP or personal computer that supports Microsoft’s Windows Media Video with DRM (digital rights management). The company will continue to add new video content to ZVUE.com weekly.

"The HandHeld team is committed to providing not only the best portable media players, but the best download site in the world for these players,"
said Jeff Oscodar, president and chief executive officer of HandHeld Entertainment. "Our new site has a look and feel that is both exciting and easy to use. We think that consumers of downloadable entertainment - from PC users to ZVUE users to users of other portable media devices - will enjoy downloading videos from our large and growing library by using our new and exciting download site: ZVUE.com."

BitTorrent announces short films online

by | June 27th, 2006


from Duke City Shootout

BitTorrent, Inc., home to the world’s leading peer-assisted file distribution platform, today announced its support for the 7th annual Duke City Shootout, the first international script-to-screen digital filmmaking competition. BitTorrent is collaborating with the Digital Filmmaking Institute (DFI), which oversees the Duke City Shootout week-long filmmaking festival, to deliver all of the digital shorts from the past six festivals. Beginning today, the shorts, 42 in total, will be available for download at http://www.bittorrent.com.

Democracy Player Updated

by | June 27th, 2006


from the Participatory Culture Foundation

Download and watch all the best internet TV shows and videos in one powerful application. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel Guide. Stop squinting at tedious web videos: sit back and watch big, high resolution videos.

Features: Democracy Player is a new kind of browser for watching videos– grab webpages with video and video RSS feeds (including podcasts, video blogs, and BitTorrent feeds), and watch them full screen, one after the other. It’s free and open source.

Update by Tiffiniy Cheng

Thursday, June 22nd, 2006- We are excited to release Baby Democracy Player (version 0.8.4) today, for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Baby Democracy is our first child, the first stage in a growing Democracy Player to come! We’ll let you know when Democracy Player becomes a toddler, a schoolkid, etc. (We’ll have pictures soon!) Baby Democracy is more stable and faster too, it’s a strong and healthy baby!

Democracy Player is now much, much more stable– we’ve fixed every crash and freeze that we know about. The application is also much faster, especially with lots of videos. This version is still a beta, but we’re getting close to shedding our infant coats and becoming a 1.0 app. Our development team have been waiting anxiously to release 0.8.4 Democracy Player because there is two months of intense development that we have to show. The developers would also like me to note that we finished exactly 420 ‘tickets’ (bug reports, features, etc) for this release.

There are also a couple new features, most notably: you can now use Democracy Player as a desktop video player– you can drag and drop or open videos in Democracy from your desktop. They will start playing and will be imported into your library. This is an important step towards making Democracy a good homebase for all the videos on your computer. (On a mac, this is especially nice because you can watch videos fullscreen with nice fullscreen controls, without buying Quicktime Pro.)

http://www.getdemocracy.com/

About

The Participatory Culture Foundation is a new non-profit organization based in Worcester, Massachusetts. Our mission is to create tools for broader, deeper engagement with culture and politics. We’re working to ensure that the new mass medium of internet TV is open and independent, just like blogging and podcasting.

Good advice for making video from the The New York Times

by myork | June 27th, 2006

“The secret to making online video is Plan, Edit, Frame.”

That is a good start!

Virginia Heffernan Screens

Video Editing Extreme Machine

by bpeterson | June 26th, 2006

We just got off the phone with our contacts at Hewlett-Packard who are configuring what’s likely to be the next hotrod here in the VM testing labs. In fact, we learned that Intel today, officially gave HP the go-ahead to start shipping units with their latest dual-core chip design, Woodcrest. This review unit will be sporting dual Intel Xeon (Woodcrest) CPUs, a couple of fast SATA drives, 2 GBs of RAM all packed into a quieter and cooler HP 8400 workstation. We haven’t got the final price tag, and this is obviously above the base model, but we figured many of you would want to see how some of your favorite video editing software packages will run on a next-gen editing system. It ships to us this week, so stay tuned!

A Day Trip to LA

by cfulton | June 26th, 2006

On Friday, I took a day trip to Los Angeles, along with sales gurus Scott Memmott and Alan Parsons, to CineGear Expo 2006. It was a very good trip, and we saw a lot of interesting stuff, including a line of noise reduction/heat removal cabinets (for use in a small studio where you have to do everything), some high-falutin’ lights, some built-to-last tripods and the ever-present Red camera prototypes. Everyone we talked to said that the show was “very LA”, definitely laid back, but still a feeling of the pro video/film priesthood that we get from some producers from time to time.

It also didn’t hurt that the weather was 25 degrees cooler than it was in Chico, and the traffic on the 405 wasn’t as horrible as we had expected it to be. Although I didn’t read the show materials too closely where it said that the exhibits would be in tents outdoors, so I got a bit of a sunburn. It’s not feeling too bad today, though.

Panasonic SDR-S200 explained

by | June 23rd, 2006

This new 3CCD camcorder and its recording format are explained in Episode 20 of our vidcast, Videomaker Presents. Also, check out the DIY pop-filter demo and aerial shooting tips. We’ve been tackling storage issues and archiving methods this month; to Keep the vidcasts around we’ve started printing the master video files back to tape. Why? Well the eight to 9 GB files don’t quite make it onto Dual Layer DVD discs, Blu-ray and HD-DVD burners are still a bit pricey, and heck, Mini DV is pretty inexpensive.
Watch or download them at www.videomaker.com/vidcast

TriLab Productions Announces Home Move Essentials Vol. 1

by | June 21st, 2006


Reprinted from a TriLab Productions press release:

TriLab Productions announces the release of Home Movie Essentials Volume 1, the first volume in a series designed for the home movie editor. This volume covers travel and theater themes. With a total of 40 clips, Home Movie Essentials includes intros, outros, video backgrounds for titles and wipes and transitions. Adding a touch of pizzazz, sound effects are embedded in specified clips. Topping off the collection as a bonus are 10 theme sets of DVD menu templates, DVD cover art, and DVD label art.

TriLab Productions is the first company to deliver animations in both standard (4:3) and widescreen (16:9) formats in the same package.

Pricing and Availability
Home Movie Essentials Volume 1 is available now at the introductory price of $97. They can be purchased directly from Digital Hotcakes. For more information, visit our web site or call 866-745-7334.

Apple lowers price on Shake to $499

by | June 20th, 2006


from C|Net News

By Candace Lombardi

Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Aside from adding new features, Apple Computer has dropped the price of its video compositing and effects software by more

than 80 percent. The new version, Shake 4.1, will be priced at $499 as opposed to $2,999. Shake 4.1 is used in conjunction

with Final Cut Studio, Apple’s video and audio editing suite. Shake is known for being used by the visual effects supervisors

of “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” which won an Oscar for its visual effects in 2004. But the significant

price drop indicates a change in accessibility for independent filmmakers and film students.

As with other software programs released in universal version, Apple is requiring current Shake 4 owners to pay $49 for

what it calls a “crossgrade”–an upgrade that makes the software compatible with Intel-based Macs. In March Apple shipped the

first universal version of Final Cut Studio for $1,299 with a “crossgrade” fee between $99 and $699, depending on the

previous version owned. On some occasions, Apple has waived the crossgrade fee for certain applications. In April, Apple cut

the price for Aperture, its photo work-flow management software, from $499 to $299. The crossgrade fee for Aperture universal

had been waived in January.

http://news.com.com/Apple+drops+Shake+price+drastically/2110-1026_3-6085716.html?tag=nefd.hed


Videomaker.com » The Lounge » Blogs » Video News