Today Dell is announcing it’s new line of performance workstations, and we at Videomaker were lucky enough to get a Precision T7600 in for an early look. Even before firing it up, it’s clear that this workstation was built to work. If you’re getting a Mac Pro vibe you’re not alone. The carved mesh front and rectangular top handle is reminiscent of that iconic look, but don’t let its looks fool you. Dell has pushed functional design to new levels with the T7600, by putting user convenience at the forefront. Read the rest of this entry »
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Dell Announces New Line of High Performance Precision Workstations
Lenovo Releases Fast Charging ThinkPad X1 Laptops
As anyone who’s ever owned a 4G cellphone knows, battery life means everything in gadgets. Especially in laptops, the lack of good battery life means you’ll constantly find yourself with a 5 pound paperweight every time you leave the house. Not to mention the fact that if you plan on needing to play HD footage or render footage you can also plan on having your battery die quicker than a mayfly. Enter the new Lenovo ThinkPad X1. With this model, Lenovo claims that you can charge its standard battery to 80% in just 30 minutes. This means that whether you kill your battery working on a project or just playing an epic game of Angry Birds on a plane, you should be able to have a fully charged battery by the time your layover has ended. This comes on the cusp of a few scientific breakthroughs in battery technology that we’ve reported on in an earlier blog post which makes us wonder if the technology has already gone into development or if Lenovo ended up making this breakthrough on their own.
Though that is amazing in and of itself, Lenovo has also announced that this laptop will also be ultraportable meaning that it is less than 17 millimeters thick and weighs in at 3.5 pounds – not a back breaker by any means. Lenovo has also found it convenient to include a 13.3 inch screen with Gorilla glass technology to protect the screen from scratches and cracks. Thanks to Intel, the X1 also sports their Wireless Display technology so wireless video can be streamed right from the laptop to a wireless-ready TV. Though there aren’t a lot of televisions that can handle that technology quite yet, it seems like it will just be a matter of time before this becomes fashionable. Who doesn’t want to eliminate the clutter of cables behind most TV’s?
The laptop comes with an Intel Core 15-2520M with 3MB of L3 cache and supports up to 8 GB of RAM. One of the coolest parts about this laptop and many others that are coming out is the option to get 160GB of SSD storage for fast start ups and read/write times. Of course that speed will definitely put a ding on your wallet, so you’ll have to decide just how badly you’ll need the speed. Overall, this laptop seems like a great machine for run-and-gun style editing though it’s no desktop replacement. Of course that’s not what you pay for in a laptop so if convenience and portability are a must for your productions, this could be the laptop for you. Lenovo has announced the price will start at US$1,399.
Racetrack Memory Can Make Your Hard Drive 100,000 Times Faster In 5 Years
Remember the good ol’ days of VHS tape (if you can call them that)? Well, it seems those days are back. Before you start to laugh or roll your eyes, it should be said that there won’t be any large, blocky, plastic cassettes to insert into a player. Rather, scientists from the EPFL school in Switzerland are using the same nickel-iron material to make nonowires that can store bits of information magnetically. The interesting part is both the speed and the amount of memory that can be put on the chip. When a user decides to access that memory, it simply gets pushed around inside the tape using a spin polarized current which allows it to go several hundred miles per second. Of course, the real beauty of the design is that billions of these nanowires could be embedded on a chip providing a seriously large capacity hard drive that would also be shock proof at the same time.
Of course, the real question is if we will even see this technology in our lifetime. I can’t tell you how many times I hear about a cool new technology only to be completely deflated when I read at the end of the announcement that it won’t be available until sometime after the apocalypse. Thankfully, this isn’t the case with racetrack memory. Since the scientists who discovered the speed of racetrack memory have a great relationship with IBM, they are saying we could be seeing this as a market-ready product in 5-7 years. A technology that can make hard drives 100,000 times faster than current models in 5 years time? I suppose we can all live with that.
I’m sure you don’t need to be convinced of the huge potential this technology has for video editing. With read and write speeds being 100,000 times faster, we could have applications that open up instantaneously and video that renders twice as fast as what you could possibly get right now without an SSD. As video editors, I’m sure that’s something we can all tip our hats to.
Future Computer Technology for Video
With the excitement behind the iPad and with the NAB conference just around the corner, it’s hard not to catch technology fever. As I’m sure you’ve heard countless times before, technology is rapidly changing. Ever since 1985 when Videomaker first started, the magazine has covered everything from reel to reel Super VHS editing to high speed laptops running advanced non-linear editing programs. With such a vast amount of change in so few years, it is hard not to wonder where it’s all going to go from here.
Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the history of the CPU, or Central Processing Unit. Due to the miracle of silicon, brilliant engineers have been able to take a processor from 9.3 million transistors in 1995 to 2 billion in 2008. However, given today’s technology, engineers are fast approaching the day when it will be impossible to fit additional transistors on a CPU chip due to the fact that engineers are going to need nanotechnology to do the job. With that being the case, CPU companies have instead started to stack chips together with multicore technology. Unfortunately, this again can only last so long as you eventually run out of space in a computer to place these extra chips. As a result, researchers are turning to new materials to write with on CPUs. For example, researchers from IBM and Georgia Tech recently ran a silicon/germanium helium supercooled transistor at 500 GHz. Although this was only a single transistor, if IBM was able to match this speed with multiple transistors, computing power could advance a whopping hundred-fold. As a secondary measure, IBM also developed a graphene transistor that can operate at 100 GHz, or 20 times faster than some of the fastest processors in the market today with the advantage that graphene doesn’t need to be supercooled in order to run at faster speeds. At the same time, it can be manufactured in the same way as silicon chips are today. With graphene based chips, computers of the future could process HD video clips faster than SD clips process on current computers, meaning that you’ll finally have some time to be creative on a deadline. Read the rest of this entry »
Interview with Regis on Archiving and 12 Core Computers
Looking at the title of this blog, you might be thinking since when did the one time host of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” become an expert on all things video? Believe me, I’d be thinking the same thing. However, instead of interviewing Regis Philbin (whose knowledge on all things behind the camera is more than suspect), we had the privilege of interviewing someone who definitely knows what he’s talking about when it comes to computers and archiving: Regis Mencer, owner of Cerise Computers.
Regis has been making computers since before his company was started back in 2003. Since 2003, Cerise (pronounced Seh-reese) has been making computers that specialize in high end performance for both editors and photographers. Evidence of this can be seen by just taking a quick glance at their website where they have computers with specs so crazy that you might have to put yourself in a straightjacket in order to believe it. They have options for the latest graphics cards, solid state drives, and even for up to 96 GB of RAM!
Coming to a television near you: Internet on TV
Yes. We know. Web searching on TV has been around for a while. But not exactly in a way users have wanted it. Some call it “the last 10 feet”, bridging the internet from the computer to your TV in the living room.
The question has always been, how to get the internet to your TV in an easy, friendly and unobtrusive way. There have been huge boxes made just for that purpose, along with long download times, and some computers have the connectivity already in place, if you have to proper cables and your TV has the proper connection. However… these all proved too cumbersome for the average TV watcher and were received by the viewing audience in a less than enthusiastic manner.
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