Watchout 4.1—New Features

Dataton will introduce Watchout 4.1 at InfoComm, and they’ve added a couple powerful features that will address some of its weaknesses as a compositor—blend modes and travel mattes. Along with the other new features in v4, Watchout is expanding beyond a display tool and quickly becoming a more powerful creative tool in its own right.

AJA Ki Pro – Records directly to ProRes

AJA Ki Pro

I am a big fan of Apple’s ProRes codec; their marketing line is “uncompressed HD quality at SD file sizes.” We’ve been using it in-house for video since its release with Final Cut Studio 2, and we’ve been really pleased with the compression.

I am also a fan of AJA’s Kona line of capture cards; the quality and level of service is unsurpassed.

Needless to say, when AJA announced the Ki Pro, a digital recorder that accepts component analog, SDI, and HDMI and records directly to ProRes files, I was intrigued. This device previewed very well at NAB, and should be available for sale by the end of the month. I can’t wait to see how much this will smooth out digital workflows from acquisition to post.

Mind Like Water

Water Ripples

I’ve found myself having the “mind like water” discussion over and over with colleagues and clients in the last couple weeks. It’s a notion I borrowed from David Allen, which he borrowed from his martial arts training.

Picture a still body of water. Throw a pebble into it, and you get little ripples. Drop a boulder in, and you get huge waves. Water always reacts appropriately; you never get huge waves cascading from a little pebble. Water never overreacts, and always returns to calm.

As we get stressed, we tend to overreact and fail to return to calm.  We give small details undue attention, and avoid larger issues we should be paying more attention to.  The “mind like water” challenge is keep our responses proportional to our inputs.

GridIron Flow Goes Beta

GridIron Software’s new product, Flow, has entered public beta today.

Flow is a revolutionary piece of software for designers—a visual workflow manager. It tracks files as you work on them, keeping tabs on the different versions and dependencies. It promises no more lost files, no more version hassles, and no more dependency nightmares when one project relies on changing media from another project.

25th Anniversary of the Macintosh

Macintosh_128k

Happy anniversary, Mac.

25 years ago, Apple introduced the Macintosh and changed the way we thought about computers.  For anyone outside a research lab, a computer with a graphical user interface was a revolutionary change in the way we worked with computers.

The Mac was a huge innovation, and its influence is still felt today, but our interactions with computers since its introduction have been largely evolutionary.  Seeing multi-touch and speech recognition technologies taking hold in our daily lives today suggests we are on the cusp of revolutionary change.

It’s very exciting to think that we are starting to design our computers to interact with us, instead of forcing us to adapt ourselves to our computers.  The implications in communications are huge. Most of our presentations today are static, with viewers passively receiving messaging due to technological limitations. Now, we are developing the tools to convert our viewers into participants, letting them interact with our messaging dynamically—even physically—with sight, sound, and touch.

Here’s to the next 25 years.