Broadcast Engineers has an article For broadcasters, the name of the game is efficiency which really comes as no surprise:
Finding new and better ways of improving staff productivity and support new and existing distribution channels is key for broadcasters looking to successfully navigate the ever changing competitive landscape and remain relevant in today’s multichannel universe.
If you want to be among the first to see a Lumberjack preview demonstration, but don’t want to sign up for the whole retreat? Good news, there’s a one day, demo room only package. This is your chance to influence the future direction of Lumberjack.
Broadcast Engineering magazine thinks that the global market for 4K and beyond – ultra HD – will remain small into the foreseeable future.
After Terry Curren’s round up of last year’s Hollywood Post Alliance Retreat I decided I should attend this year. While I was working on marketing for Lumberjack – our real time location logging tool – I got an email from the HPA offering spaces in the demo room during the retreat. It was immediately obvious that this was the time and place to reveal what we’ve been working for the last 8-9 months.
For a number of reasons Multicam has been a topic of conversation around our house. During the discussion today, I realized that it was a fairly serious trend that I don’t recall covering in my look back, nor on the Terence and Philip Show’s 2013 predictions.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I’ve been preaching the value of metadata for longer than I’ve been writing this blog. Usually to a very quiet house! Â Certainly when I started there was very little recognition of the value to postproduction of production metadata. In fact I’ve coined the term “pre-post” to describe how metadata from the set can be used to save time in post.Â
I have a strong interest – personally and professionally – to want to automate the boring parts of post-production away from humans to computers, extending to some of the basic string-outs. This seems to infringe on the “human” role in postproduction, at least according to some of my associates. Well, lately I’ve come across a whole series of stories on how traditionally human roles, like doctors (and assistant editors), can or will be automated out of existence. That’s led me to think about what is the essential role of the human that can’t be automated? It’s not a simple question.
Pixels – those little dots that make up all our video images – are hard to encode and push down pipelines, even with ever-increasing encoding efficiency. On the other hand, vectors are small and very efficient, but so far have proved difficult to apply to video content.
One of the more interesting press releases coming  this week out of CES, was from RAMP, a company I’d not heard of before, but with some interesting technology if the press release is to be believed for automatically generated metadata. (I say let’s give them the benefit of the doubt!)
You know how the end of the year comes up and you wonder where the year went? Well, Greg (my partner who writes our software) calculated where his year went:
Event Manager X, Â released July 2011 (7 updates over 6 months in 2011; 9 updates in 2012)
 Xto7 for Final Cut Pro  a.k.a Project Xto7, released October 2011 (8 updates in 2 months during 2011; 17 updates in 2012)
7toX for Final Cut Pro, released  January 30, 2012 (16 updates over 11 months)
Sync-N-Link X, released April 2012 (5 updates over 8 months)
Sequence Clip Reporter , 7 updates in 2012
With updates to our other Final Cut Pro 7 software, it’s a total of  63 releases or updates to apps in a year, or more than one a week.