MacWorld Round Up

Just got back from Macworld 2008. Here’s a round up of Video related news:

Apple Pretty disappointing product announcements for video enthusiasts. The much anticipated MacBook Air is woefully unsuited for video production, and for the price, video enthusiasts are much better served by Apple’s remarkable MacBook Pro lineup. However complaining about the MacBook Air not being an editing machine, is kind of like complaining that a screwdriver is not a hammer. Different tools, different purposes. A much more relevant announcement for our readers was actually the pre-announcement of a refreshed line of MacPro models.

Adobe continued to show off their very capable CS3 Production Premium suite. But no new products or announcements were forthcoming.

Storyist Software was showing their newest version of Storyist 1.3.5. It’s a screenwriting word processor that formats your scripts into screenplay format, but also has many unique tools to help keep track of your overall script. Features such as a virtual bulletin board with 3×5 index cards allow you to change the scenes around just like in the old days. Also interesting were the customizable story sheets allowing you to keep data on your characters, locations etc, along with your script, as well as wikki syntax linking which can turn your script into a multi-layered living document.

Vara software was showing their Videocue software. A combination teleprompter and basic video mixing console that lets the user create complete webcasts from their computer. It mixes, live webcam video with graphics and transitions that follow along your teleprompter script, letting you queue the whole show up beforehand and outputting very polished results.

Podtrac was there helping you make some advertising revenue from your podcast. They specialize in connecting podcast producers with advertisers, as well as having may free demographic and tracking services available to you so you know who is watching your show, and what they like.

mDialog gives you an easy method of both encoding and uploading your videos online. Targeted specifically at the professional producer as well as the amateur video enthusiast, Mdialog gives you the ability to get your content seen on a variety of media, including online viewing, as well as downloads to Mac’s, PC’s, iPods, and iTunes via their mNetwork channels.

Buffalo was representing the storage front, with several new models of both portable and standard external storage products, including the MiniStation which is a USB bus-powered hard drive with up to 320 GB capacity.

Dulce Systems was also showcasing it’s many storage solutions designed specifically for video editing. On display was the Pro DQ raid setup for security while maintaining fast transfer speeds, regardless of how full the array gets. It has a capacity of up to 8 Terabytes, with transfer speeds of 570 MB/s for Raid 5.

Pyro AV announced Pyro Kompressor HD, a video card the acclerates video compression of MPEG HD and h.264 HD content. Ambric, the supplier for Kompressor HD’s processor, is the heart of this device which speeds up transcoding to near realtime in h.264 and realtime in MPEG 2. It’s quite an achievement with nearly identical quality comparisons with the most trusted software compression tools. The Pyro Kompressor HD retails for $3,495.

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