[Scott Thomas]

[Erik] “Apple steered me wrong. On Apples own admition, the new G5 will not work with previous versions of FCP(4, 4.5, 4.5 HD) only FCP 5! The reason Apple give is that the “old” FCP does not support the “new” graphics cards! In contrast, AE 6.5 and Lightwave do support the new hardware. How can Apple with a clear conscience do this?”

With Core Image, it probably uses the video card in a different way than AE and Lightwave. Apple probably doesn’t want to take a step backwards and write new drivers for older, less capable video cards. It could also be a way to guarantee a certain level of performance.

Time marches on.

[Scott Thomas]

Apple is still selling the Dual 2.7Ghz with PCI-X.

[Scott Thomas]

Thanks for the info.

[Scott Thomas]

DigiBeta has a compression ratio of around 3:1 not SX.

DV is around 5:1 and it’s datarate is a fixed 25Mb/s.
BetaSX has a datarate of 15Mb/s and is Mpeg based.

So, if 25Mb/s is 5:1 what is 15Mb/s?

I believe an SX deck will play pack both analog Beta and DigiBeta tapes. That alone may make it more valuable.

Now, if only it would play my Betamax recordings… 🙂

[Scott Thomas]

The same thing happened to my Accom stock. In that case, the owners just transfered the assets of Accom to a new company they created. Thanks guys!

[Scott Thomas]

[Charlie King] “The advantages of VITC is that it reads the time code better at low speeds and actually stopped on a freeze frame, LTC is guessing, albeit a damn good guess most of the time when stopped and can read quite well at low speeds.”

The “guessing” is usually done by counting control track pulses.

Also, While VITC excels at reading the tape at slow speeds, LTC is better at reading TC when shuttling the tape at fast speeds.

[Scott Thomas]

Nearest Neighbor is tantamount to just turning off all pixel filtering. I use it when I need to downsample a huge multi-gigabyte print project to a reasonable size to print or turn into a PDF for a client.

Here’s an example:
https://www.eyewire.com/tips/mini/nearest.html

[Scott Thomas]

We get a lot of crappy mug-shots for newscasts from local police departments and viewers with cellphone photos of tornados. I also get the “just get our logo from the business card” crap. I wish there was a magic bullet.

If I have to use really low-res elements and make them somewhat presentable, I do a few things in photoshop that you can mix-and-match.

One thing I do is blow up the image in question 200% or better.

I will then attempt the “median” filter (under noise). that will sometimes mask some rough edges and smooth things out a bit.

I’ve sometimes tried adding noise before I do other “fixes”. Noise sometimes adds a bit of randomness that reduces banding when doing heavy processing.

If you convert the image to LAB color space, you get some new options to try. LAB color space is one luminance channel and two chroma channels. (Similar to Betacam or D1 component). I will then try adding a Gaussian Blur to just the two chroma channels and use the Median on the luminance. You might then try an Unsharp Mask to attempt to bring back some detail.

Salt to taste. 🙂

[Scott Thomas]

[AJA Sales Department] “*Video + Key Support*”

Very cool. Any chance that this feature will make it’s way to the KonaLS?

[Scott Thomas]

It was also at one time the most common connector for composite video. I don’t think the BNC connector replaced it until the mid to late 1970’s. I’ve seen old RCA video DAs from the late 1960’s that used PL-259s… They were still in use at a TV station I worked at in the late 1990’s! They might still be there.