Tonight at the midnight hour, a huge war will finally be settled… Or will it? Due to a bitter dispute over fees Time Warner may very well eliminate Fox programming from select markets all across the country. The dispute largely centers around a proposed rate increase and the end result seems to be the Fox network and cable channels disappearing from Time Warner’s cable network tonight.

“It looks like we will not reach an agreement and our channels may very well go off the air in Time Warner Cable systems at midnight,” wrote News Corp president and chief operating officer Chase Carey in an internal memo sent to company employees on Wednesday.

This means Football, American Idol, 24, House, The Simpsons and more would no longer be available to Comcast subscribers. According to Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt, “Consumers should not be held hostage during these negotiations. That’s just wrong.”

In a turn of events that is simply startling to say the least, Time Warner has released a how to video examining connecting a PC to a TV so viewers can view Internet video on sites like Hulu and Fancast. What does that mean?  This means that now we are witnessing Time Warner essentially cut out the legs from under both Fox for offering content online as well as themselves for showing customers how to receive without subscribing to a cable provider. Here is the video below, be sure to tell us what you think about this interesting period in cable history.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iujkZh5uIa8

When HD was first introduced to the video world back in the 1990’s, IT departments at production houses around the world gave a collective groan. Back then the best video transfer speeds were 50 MB/s with a Firewire cable, making HD video transfers a huge vortex of wasted time. With the advent of Firewire 800 (which was capable of speeds up to 100 MB/s) and eSATA (with speeds up to 380 MB/s), video transfer speeds took a huge leap forward. Even so, video editors were still losing precious years of their life waiting for HD projects to transfer from one hard disk to another.

Now USB 3.0 is looking to solve that problem. With the support of manufacturers such as Sony, Intel, Microsoft, Compaq, and IBM, USB has quickly become the connection of choice for computer equipment ranging from keyboards and mice, to coffee warmers and iPods. As a result, USB cables and connections have become by far the most common in the computer world. So when USB 3.0 was announced in 2007 with speeds up to 400 MB/s, the video world quickly realized that there was huge potential behind the new technology due to its many features and advantages.

One of the greatest features of USB 3.0 is that a 25 GB file can be transferred in just 70 seconds essentially eliminating the frustration of wasted time when transferring large HD assets from one hard drive to another. Additionally, with such high read/write speeds, USB 3.0 has become a viable connection for editing on external hard drives without the speed delays of current connections. This gives studios and editors a reasonable workflow option in a world where solid state media recording has become the new norm. With rapidly falling prices on external storage, studios now have the option to buy hard drives such as Buffalo’s newly released SuperSpeed USB 3.0 external DriveStation HD, edit on them, and then store them much like tapes were stored in the past. The advantages of this set-up is when a client asks for a re-edit on an old project, instead of having to reconnect footage from tape, studios can simply connect their external hard drive using USB 3.0 to their computer and start editing right away saving huge amounts of transfer time. Lastly, another potential advantage of USB 3.0 is its increase in the market. It is quite possible that if you are at a friend’s house with a USB 3.0 hard drive and no cable, that your friend will probably have a USB 3.0 cable for you to hook your hard drive to your computer.

As great as USB 3.0 could be for video editors, there are also some other interesting products that could be a great boon to the video-editing world. Just this last May, the Serial ATA Organization announced the specs for SATA revision 3.0, allowing for transfer speeds of up to 700 MB/s. Also, Intel also announced a curious new technology called Light Peak. Light Peak is an optical cable standard that can deliver bandwidth from 1.25 GB/s to 12.5 GB/s. Whichever technology becomes the standard, one thing is for sure: the future for HD video production has never looked so good.

With the decade coming to an end, what does the future of filmmaking have in store?

It has never been easier to produce a film; digital cameras and edit suites are cheaper than ever. Limitations have fallen one by one, allowing basically anyone the ability to produce a feature film with a little bit of determination. Within the last 10 years we have seen the rise of Youtube.com, which has caused a growth in online distribution as well as a change in culture. According to a study by ChangeWave Research, audiences are shifting away from traditional TV in favor of online entertainment, and now spend more free time viewing content online than they do watching TV. The change in where we view content is comparable to the switch from gathering around the radio, to gathering around the television; except now virtually anyone can produce the content without much of a budget.

That being said, not all films are going to be shown to the masses or go viral. However, it is still possible to put your film online and offer them as downloads in niche markets. This in turn has brought growth to niche markets such as extreme sports and online education. I expect other markets to soon follow in the coming decade as advertisers strive to reach very specific audiences. In the future, instead of random searches for online video, niche market websites will make it easy to find the kinds of entertainment you want to watch.

Today is the day that happens at least once every year…. Thats right, X Mass! And it will be a merry one to all. Which got me thinking about some of my favorite Christmas movies.  Who can forget the films we grew up knowing and loving and the memories they bring back around the holidays. I can remember when I saw my mother’s reaction to some of the scenes in Home Alone, and how surprised I was. The memories with my brothers watching Ernest Saves Christmas and laughing until milk would fly out of our nose. Although my favorite had to have been watching the Christmas horror film Santa’s Slay starring ex-professional wrestler Bill Goldberg as a very angry Santa who works for Satan.

One of the everlasting iconic moments of cinematic history as far as X Mas films go took place in the classic The Christmas Story, where the main characters brother licked a frozen pole on a dare and ended up with his tongue getting stuck to it! Our friends at IndyMogul decided to show you how to pull off this trick in their latest edition of Barkyard FX. Take a look, and see if it inspires you to make your very own X Mas classic.

The particles solution artists have been waiting for.

Sprite-Based 2D Particles Plug-In Delivers Stunning Natural Effects With Unprecedented Simplicity

Wondertouch by GenArts announced today the immediate availability of particleIllusion for After Effects (pIAE) for users of Adobe After Effects on Windows. Available as a plug-in for the first time, particleIllusion for After Effects enables artists to create gorgeous particle effects directly within After Effects, producing a more efficient workflow and significantly enhanced productivity. Like its stand-alone sibling particleIllusion 3.0, pIAE is built on the industry’s most robust 2D particle generation engine. As a result, it features the same highly acclaimed speed and ease of use that have made wondertouch products so popular with more than 10,000 compositing artists around the world. In addition, pIAE provides access to the thousands of existing wondertouch emitters — downloadable presets designed to allow users to effortlessly create natural, high-quality effects such as smoke, fire, explosions, sparkles, fireworks and countless abstract effects — without ever leaving the After Effects environment.

Now Mac-based editing workgroups using EditShare storage solutions will be able to work collaboratively, accessing in real time a pool of media files.

EditShare, the technology leader in cross platform collaborative editing and shared media storage systems, announced compatibility for the Apple® Snow Leopard® release. The award-winning EditShare multi-channel ingest, shared storage and archiving solutions offer special project sharing capabilities for Broadcast, Postproduction and DI editing workgroups. “The nature of EditShare business is creative-based with a good portion of customers using Apple hardware. Fully qualifying this popular OS release for EditShare solutions was our top priority. EditShare customers tend to push the boundaries of technologies and often embrace advancements such as the new Snow Leopard,” comments Andy Liebman, President and Founder, EditShare. “So it is with great pleasure that we officially add this new OS to the list of supported platforms.”

Thanks to EditShare’s patented bin-locking / project-locking framework, Mac-based editors using Apple Final Cut Pro® and Avid® editing applications can instantly see, copy or revise the work of colleagues with the assurance that a bin, sequence or project will never get accidentally deleted or overwritten. Via a file-manager type interface, editors can clearly see all the bins and project files being used by all editors in their group. Bins and projects belonging to other editors are automatically opened as “Read Only,” and control can easily be transferred from one editor to another.