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DVC Email Newsletter November 2007
| DVC News | Format Support - a quick round up of current HD formats |
| ProDad News | DVC now a reseller of ProDad plug-ins |
| Canopus News | Edius 4.54 is available. Free Edius NEO with some analogue-digital converters. |
| New Video Gear | Some new mixers and external drive bays |
| Adobe News | DVC Pro HD added to Premiere Pro 3. |
| Matrox News | 3.1 update for Matrox Axio and RT.X2 |
| Pinnacle News | News on Liquid's future |
| Sony News | 10% off Sony Vegas 8 until Christmas! |
| Bluray News | The latest rumour from the battle front... |
| Black Magic News | CS3 drivers are out |
| NewTek News | Some special offers from Newtek |
Firstly apologies that there has been a long wait since the last newsletter. Quite a lot has been happening and sometimes that gets in the way of writing it down! You can always check out the news section on our home page for the latest information.
Format Support
We are asked about different format support a lot so here is a quick run down of which programs support the emerging video formats.
DVCPro HD - as used on Panasonic P2 cameras - supported by Canopus Edius Broadcast, Adobe Premiere CS3, and Avid Xpress Pro/Media Composer.
Sony XDCam - Canopus Edius Broadcast, Adobe Premiere CS3 - only if you buy an Matrox Axio based system, otherwise it is not supported, Sony Vegas and Avid Xpress Pro/Media Composer.
Sony XDCam-EX - Not supported currently but we expect support soon with Canopus Edius Broadcast (scheduled for the end of this year), Adobe Premiere CS3 with a Matrox Axio (in a couple of months), Sony Vegas Pro 8 and Avid Xpress Pro/Media Composer.
AVCHD - This is a new format which records to disc. It makes great pictures in a small space but is very compressed and hard to edit. Currently supported by: Pinnacle Studio (no plans to add it to Avid Liquid), Canopus Edius Pro 4 (will edit it directly on the timeline or let you convert it into a much easier to use Canopus HQ format), Sony Vegas (again will edit it directly or convert it to Cineform). You could edit this format using Adobe Premiere if you buy a capture card like a Matrox RT.X2 (where you could capture it through component connections) or Black Magic Intensity (where you can capture through HDMI) but you cannot edit the format natively with Premiere Pro, and we do not expect this format to be added until Premiere Pro 4.
DVC have been appointed as a Uk reseller for ProDad plug ins. You may not have heard of ProDAD but you may already be using some of their plug-ins. Adorage is a set of transitions that plugs into Premiere, Liquid and Edius and actually a set of these already ship with Edius. ProDAD have more of these transitions plus some other very useful plug-ins.
Mercalli
One of the newest items is Mercalli, an excellent image stabiliser. This basically takes shaky footage and stabilises it. There are several variations of this kind of plug-in available, and programs like After Effects have it built-in, however what Mercalli does is to do a good job and to do it easily and well. Essentially you apply the effects to a clip, set it to analyzer the footage, which is does pretty quickly, and then return back to the timeline.
With most image stabilisers you need to define an area for the plug-in to scan, then scan, then refine etc. Mercalli does it automatically. that does not mean you do not have any control over the process - you can choose from several presets, adjust how much you want to stabilise the shot, and decide how much you want to zoom into the shot afterwards. It also has the option of dynamic boarders where by the programs zooms in a bit but also creates extra boarders based on the existing shot that you don't lose too much of the image.
There are two versions of Mercalli - Light and Expert. Expert adds more options and will stabilise HD footage as well as DV.
Mercalli plugs into Adobe Premiere Pro 1, 1.5, 2 and CS3, as well as all variations of Premiere Elements. It also works in Avid Liquid 7 and Canopus Edius 4.X. You can see more information on the Mercalli Website.
Mercalli Light is £45 inc VAT, and Mercalli Expert is £91 inc VAT. Both can be ordered from the DVC Webshop.
Heroglyph
Heroglyph is a titling program that lets you do animated 2D and 3D titles easily. It has quite a large variety of tools as well - not just for animating text but also drawing paths and even making video walls. Do you want to draw a route on a map? There is a tool for just this - you can even add an arrow or a little car at the start. Do you want to have some words drawn on screen and appear as if written - again Heroglyph has a tool for just this. Or do you want to have each letter of each word arrive and jump out at you as they do - again easy to do with Heroglyph.
Heroglyph plugs into Adobe Premiere 6.5, Adobe Premiere Pro 1, 1.5, 2 and CS3, as well as all variations of Premiere Elements. It also works in Avid Liquid 7, Avid Xpress Pro 5 and Media Composer 2, and Canopus Edius 3.x & 4.x. You can see more information on the ProDad Website.
Interestingly when plugged into Edius or Premiere it appears just like the other native titling programs - so in Edius you add it to the title track as you would with Title Motion Pro or Quick Titler, and you can even choose it as the default title program so it appears every time you press the T button!
There are two versions of Heroglyph - the full version and Heroglyph Rapid. The Rapid version is the same as the full but with less control and animation capabilities.
Heroglyph Rapid is £62 inc VAT, Heroglyph full is £170 inc VAT. There are also a couple of extra creative packs available at £77 each. All can be ordered from the DVC webshop.
VistaScene
VistaScene is a collection of additional effects for your editing program. It includes filters similar to those available elsewhere, but all designed by ProDad and included in one package. If you have the right kind of graphic card they are accelerated by the card as well. There is a test utility which will confirm whether your graphic card is suitable.
The filters include:
Movie Looks - these are similar to the kinds of looks you get with Magic Bullet.
Sparkles and glows - generate sparkles based on the light areas of the image, all fully adjustable. Add that magic look to any scene. You can also use these as sparkly boarders for scenes.
Old Movie filter - complete with all the usual nonsense.
Shine effect - similar to the Matrox shine or Trapcode plug-in but better quality and more configurable than the Matrox. Combine it with a title and get light to shine out of the letters.
Of course everything is thoroughly keyfamable and like all plug-ins you just add the filter to the clip, adjust the settings and then return to your editing program to render the result.
There are some sample videos on the ProDad website showcasing some of these filters.
VistaScene plugs into Adobe Premiere Pro 1, 1.5, 2 and CS3, Adobe After Effects 7 & 8, as well as all variations of Premiere Elements. It also works in Avid Liquid 7, Avid Xpress Pro 5 and Media Composer 2, and Canopus Edius 4.x and Sony Vegas 5-8. You can see more information on the ProDad Website.
Vistascene is £303 inc VAT and available now from the DVC website.
Adorage
One Adorage collection already ships with Canopus Edius - and there 9 volumes in total. Adorage is a selection of transitions for various editing programs which includes many that you simply will not find anywhere else. It is not really possible to describe the full range here so check out the samples on the ProDAD website.
The 9 packages all need a basic installer called the All plug-ins collection, which is £22. Once you have this then you can add as many packages as you like. Each package costs £38 inc VAT, or you can buy all 9 packages for £307 inc VAT. The different packages are:
Adorage plugs into Adobe Premiere 6.5, Adobe Premiere Pro 1, 1.5, 2 and CS3, as well as all variations of Premiere Elements. It also works in Avid Liquid 7, Canopus Edius 3.x & 4.x, Lets Edit and Rex Edit, Sony Vegas 4 upwards, Ulead Media Studio 6 upwards and Ulead Video Studio 9 & 10. You can see more information on the ProDad Website.
You can order these now from the DVC Website.
Edius 4.54 is out
Canopus have released a patch for Edius 4.5. 4.54 fixes a few small bugs that were in Edius 4.5, most notably the bug that meant that you did not see the output from your titling window on a TV attached to you system when editing.
The full list of fixes is:
Download now from the Canopus website.
Grass Valley Neo In stock
Neo is a version of the popular Canopus Edius with some bits removed and a bit cheaper. It will edit HD footage using the same Canopus HQ codec that Edius uses to achieve good realtime play back, but does not work with Canopus' NX and SP boards to give you HD playback on a proper video monitor. In addition the following have also been removed:
Edius Neo other major difference is that it works on Windows Vista as well as Windows XP. Edius is only validated for XP currently, although we have used the software only successfully on Vista, with a few small niggles. A Vista version of Edius will arrive next year.
Edius Neo is £129 +VAT. An upgrade to Neo from Canopus simple, discontinued editing program, Lets Edit is £65 +VAT. An upgrade from Neo to Edius 4.5 is £249 +VAT.
You can also buy Neo in a bundle with and ACEDVIO card which adds SD analogue output. This bundle is called Edius Neo XL and is £255+VAT. Neo is also available in a bundle with the FireCoder. The latter is a board that does realtime MPEG2 and MPEG4 encoding from Edius, as well as being able to capture into these formats. The Neo/FireCoder bundle is £299+VAT.
Free copy of Edius Neo with Canopus ADVC
From now until 22nd December if you buy a Canopus ADVC110, ADVC300 or ADVC700 or ADVC1000 and get a free copy of Edius Neo.
The ADVC110 is a bi-directional SVideo/composite to DV converter and is £179 +VAT. With the demise of the popular DAC-200 this becomes our cheapest a/d converter.
The ADVC300 is similar to the ADVC110 but has a built-in timebase corrected to tidy up old footage. It is £349 +VAT.
The ADVC700 is bi-directional and also included component i/o as well AES/EBU and can do AV/RS422 control. It is £1,199 +VAT.
The ADVC1000is and SDI to DV converter and is £1,199 +VAT.
All available from the DVC webshop.
Other Canopus/Grass Valley Offers
The Edius NXe is currently £799+VAT - that's £100 off its normal retail price. It includes a full copy of Edius Pro 4, Title Motion and Adorage as normal.
The Edius SP is £1,099 +VAT. This includes a copy of Edius Broadcast. The broadcast version add support for various different formats including Panasonic DVCPro HD and Sony XDCam. Normally it would cost you £300 to upgrade a copy of Edius Pro to Broadcast, so if thinking of buying broadcast with an NX then it makes sense to buy the SP instead. What is different about the SP compared to the NX? The SP adds component standard definition input - where as the NXe has component output only. The SP is a PCI-X card - this makes it easier to install in Xeon based systems than the NX, although a single processor system would require a motherboard with this kind of slot, which is rare.
Edius HD has dropped in price by 40%. Edius HD adds full HD component capture to Edius, and also had HD-SDI i/o. This makes it comparable to a Matrox Axio in many ways. The board set was £ and has dropped to £. A complete system around this board would be about £
The upgrades for existing Edius SD owners have not changed so if you own an SD its almost more cost effective to get a new HD board set, preferably with a second system around it, than to upgrade your existing kit!
These are available from the DVC Webshop.
Lets Buy Stuff...
3 of Canopus simple to use programs have dropped in price.
Lets Create FX is a collection of fancy transitions
Lets Convert is a slimmed down version of Canopus ProCoder for converting between different file formats.
Let's Photo DVD is a great little program to take collections of still images and make interesting DVD slideshows from them.
All are now £22+VAT, reduced from £33.
We have quite a lot of new video gear arriving in the next month or so.
NEW "broadcast" HD monitors
We are soon to get two new broadcast style HD monitors. Our search for decent HD monitors seems to never end - we have been through loads of many different resolutions and many have failed to be up to the job. These latest monitors should be excellent quality, as they are being supplied by Holdan, distributors of both Canopus software and Datavideo's range of equipment. The 17 inch LCD HD monitors will retail at £825+VAT for component version, £1,095 +VAT for the SDI. More information on these in our next newsletter.
New Mobile Studios available
The MS-1000 is now available. It sis a full mobile studio for both HD and SD editing. The MS-1000 features 6 inputs (5 HD/SD SDI and 1 DVI/RGB) and 3 HD/SD SDI outputs, RS-422 control, Ethernet connectivity and a built in, 10-bit, 6 Channel Frame Synchronizer that synchronizes all inputs without the need for Genlock (external Genlock synchronization also available)
It is £8,700 +VAT.
The successful Datavideo SE1000 mixer, that is part of the mobile studio has dropped in price to £4,400 +VAT instead of £5,995+VAT.
Sonnet Drive boxes
Sonnet produce a range of external boxes for SATA drives that work with both MAC and PC. In previous email newsletter we talked about the Fusion 500 - a box that can take 5 SATA drives which connect to your computer via esata. Now they have added two new ones - the Fusion D800 RAID and the Fusion D400 RAID take either 8 SATA drives or 4 SATA drives. They connect to your computer via a special RAID card and so can achieve very high transfer speeds. The D800 is fast enough to handle 10 bit uncompressed HD footage which runs at about 140 MBytes/sec. This is far too fast for a single drive to cope with and even a couple of drives striped inside a normal computer will not manage it.
In addition the D800 (the 8 drive model) can be set to RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 10 & 50 and can still achieve these speed in these modes. This means you can, for example, set a box up in RAID 5, where you loose the capacity of one of the drives, but end up with decent back up of your data. If any one drive fails then you can replace it and the box will rebuild the data from the other drives.
The D400 RAID is not as fast and can only be set up as RAID 0, where all the drives are seen as one unit.
Both boxes as available as desktop or rackmount units. Without any drives installed but with the PCIe RAID card the price are:
D800 desktop - £1,250 +VAT
D800 rackmount - £1,450 +VAT
D400 desktop - £375 +VAT
D400 rackmount - £395 +VAT
Call us for pricing on these boxes with hard drives added.
The biggest news in recent months was the release the CS3 versions of the Adobe software which happened in early July. You would not expect anything new quite this soon, of course. There have been a couple of minor updates for Premiere and After Effects to fix small bugs in the program at the time of release.
It was, therefore, quite a surprise that at IBC in Amsterdam Adobe announced that Premiere Pro 3 would support Panasonic's DVCPro HD format out of the box. Up to now you would have to add a Matrox Axio to get support for this format but now Adobe will support it as standard. This is great news all round. Adding support for Panasonic's format normally adds to the price of a system - with Edius for example you need to spend £300 more to get Edius broadcast to get support for P2.
The update is now available and free to all owners of Premiere Pro 3. All you need to do is get Premiere to search for updates and it will download and install automatically. We have tested 3.1 with both our Axio and RT.X2 systems and it works fine.
For full details see the Adobe press release.
The addition of DVC Pro HD support was one of the reasons to buy and Axio, but of course there are still many others. For a start the Axio adds support for full HD (1920 x 1080) and XDCam, as well as giving you uncompressed 8 bit capture. Matrox have also recently updated the software so you can process in 10 bit as well - meaning better quality effects all round.
Although Premiere now supports DVCPro HD you essentially just copy the files on to your PC and then use them for editing - the Axio gives you full support for proxy editing as well so does DVCPro HD better then just Premiere.
For more information on the Axio visit our Axio pages.
Smartsound support for Premiere Pro free
Did you know that SmartSound, the plug-in to generate royalty free music of any length in your editing application, is actually free if for people with Premiere Pro CS3? The plug-in is on the Smartsound website - download and install into you software and start using it with no obligation. Smartsound used to ship with Premiere 6, but with the advent of Premiere Pro it stopped. Smartsound have obviously decided that it is still worth giving Premiere users access to Smartsound and hope that you will come along to them and buy new scores, and in that way they will make some money.
We have not had a chance to add the smartsound range to our webshop yet, but all the scores available on the Smartsound site are available from us at DVC and normally at £ for $ prices.
James Morris' review of After Effects CS3
James Morris always wrote informative articles about editing cards and software for PC Pro & Computer Video. Recently he posted his review of After Effects 8 on the web. Its a good round up of what's new in After Effects and why you would want to own it. Visit http://www.pcauthority.com.au/review.aspx?CIaRID=5212 to read the details.
Beware of the Leopard
A new Mac O/S has arrived - OSX 10.5 Leopard. This new O/S adds some pretty things for Mac users and now includes Boot Camp, which lets Mac users run Windows on their Mac. Most programs running on the Mac will need to be updated to run on Leopard, however, and this includes the Adobe video programs. Adobe say they will run and they have not had any major issues but that they will be issuing an update for all the video programs in the next month or so.
3.1 update available
Matrox have released an update for the RT.X2 and Axio LE. This update does not introduce support for Windows Vista, we do not expect this to be available until next year. Instead it addresses a few bugs with the 3.0 drivers and makes the drivers compatible with Premiere 3.1. The full list of changes according to Matrox are:
For RT.X2
Axio 3.1 update includes:
The update can be downloaded from the Matrox website. Please note this is only for users with the RT.X2 and Premiere Pro 3.
We reported in the last newsletter that Avid moved Liquid from the Avid division to the Pinnacle division of Avid. No more concrete news has arrived regarding the future of liquid, although an address as the Liquid Immersion user group by Jan Piros, the man in charge of Liquid at Pinnacle, suggests some big changes for the product in the long term - probably even dropping its name, although the latter could just be that having a product called Liquid Eight is not necessarily the best thing.
The revised program would be designed to be a step up from Pinnacle Studio but not competition for broadcast products like Avid Xpress Pro. It will also be designed to take advantage of some special new code inside Windows Vista which no editing program is designed to use at present. Details right now are very sketchy and we have not proper time-table for the new program, although reading between the lines we would expect it to be a year off.
The result will be that apart from a few patches there will be no new development for Liquid 7, and that means no support for some of the new formats that have emerged or Blu-ray or HD-DVD support. As soon as we have information on the new product we will let you know.
2.77 and 5.77 out
Avid have released a couple of small updates for Media Composer software and Xpress Pro. As is usual with Avid updates they just address some small issues, and are worth downloading. Find then at the Avid website.
Neither of these updates make the program compatible with Windows Vista or MAC OS Leopard, which are promised with future updates.
10% Vegas & DVD Architect until 22nd December
For a very limited time we can offer 10% off the normal price of Sony Vegas with DVD Architect 4.5 Pro. Vegas is gaining in popularity and the new version adds some significant features such as animated titling and 32 bit colour processing for better quality, as well as support for Windows Vista. It also remains one of the few programs that lets you create full 5.1 surround sound mixes and add them to your DVDs in Dolby Digital format without paying any extra licence. In fact some people even buy Vegas just to do their sound editing and then use DVD Architect, the only DVD writing program at this price to let you do different video angles and have full scripting, for their DVD authoring.
Vegas is one of the two programs we sell that support AVCHD formats on the timeline (the other being Edius 4.5). Since these are highly compressed formats they are hard work for the PC but both Vegas and Edius can convert the files into something easier to manage if required - Vegas uses Cineform and Canopus have their own HQ codec.
Sony Vegas is likely to be one of the first programs to support XDCam-EX, as you would expect from a program by Sony, although we do not have an exact date for its release at present.
Upgrade from previous versions of Vegas to Vegas 8 are available from DVC for:
The full version of Vegas 8, with the DVD writing program DVD Architect are available from us for: £404 +VAT, £474 inc.
A typical Intensity Pro Vegas system from DVC is:
For more information visit the DVC Website.
Vegas patch 8.0a
The new version of Vegas continues to gain interest. The most important news is that the Black Magic Intensity and Intensity Pro are currently supporting Vegas 8, albeit in beta form, in the latest drivers. This means that you can now add a decent HD output to a Vegas system cheaply as the Black Magic cards are £149 +VAT for the HDMI only version and £199 +VAT for the HDMI and component version. We have not had any problems so far using the Intensity and Vegas 8 on our test system.
In Premiere the Black Magic cards are overshadowed by the performance of the Matrox RT.X2 - the latter not only adds component HD input and output but also improves the performance of Premiere considerably. However, in Vegas everything is done by the computer's processor and no card exist to improve performance, so all that you really need to add to it is some kind of card to let you see the picture properly, as opposed to just on your PC screen. The Intensity does just that.
Also out is a patch for the new version of Vegas. These are the changes according to the Sony website:
News from the Battlefront...
The war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray is at a stalemate according to the head of Sony, according to recent reports, all of which does not help those of us who want to make our own discs or make more people want to rush out and but the players in the shops.
What will make people buy the players is the price dropping and that is happening. A recent offer in the US had HD-DVD players being sold for $100-$200 and they rushed out of the stores.
The HD-DVD writers we were promised at the end of september have not yet materialised, although we expect them soon.
New drivers support Premiere Pro cs3
New Black Magic drivers are available for both the Intensity and for the decklink products which include support for Premiere Pro CS3 and Sony Vegas 8. The latter is beta, but appears to work well. The Mac versions of the drivers also include support for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, making Black Magic one of the first to do so.
Download the new drivers here.
Special offer on TriCaster Studio
Until 21/12/2007 the TriCaster STUDIO has £500 off. It is normally £6,999 +VAT and is now £6,499 +VAT.
TriCaster studio is a variation of NewTek's popular TriCaster. It is a vision mixer in a box, that can mix video live and transmit it to the Internet. There are three TriCasters:
TriCaster - the original studion in a box, can mixe two video sources, through composite or SVIDEO, add graphics and video files stored on your PC and transmit it live to the Internet or to a screen attached to the TriCaster. (£3,499 +VAT)
TriCaster Pro - very similar to the TriCaster but with the component in and out as well as SVIDEO, and XLR audio inputs for sound (£4,899 +VAT)
TriCaster Sudio - The Ultimate Portable Live Production & Virtual Set System. This as all the normal features plus decent chromakey facilities and Virtual sets. live switching of up to 6 cameras, component I/O, 16:9 and 4:3 support, Dual DDR, LiveMATTE, 1 Chromakey/Input, Windows Media 11 & VC1 support.
For more information visit the NewTek Website, and you can order them from www.dvc.uk.com.
LightWave "Animate and Edit Bundle" extended until 31/12/2007.
NewTek's 3D animation program, LightWave, is being bundled with their own editing application, Speed Edit, until December 31st. Speed Edit is dubbed "the fastest editor on the planet" by NewTek because of its ability to mix many different formats on the same time without any messing around and the "unique" storyboard and timeline view which makes simple editing quick. LightWave has long been our favourite 3D program, not only because of the excellent quality rendering but also because so many sophisticated features are included at a low price.
Also for the duration of this offer NewTek are giving away a free training DVD with the bundle. When you place the order you choose from one of the following DVDS:
The stocks of DVDs are limited so if the one you choose is no longer available you may be asked for a different choice. The free training DVD bonus does not apply to upgrades and educational references.
You can order this bundle now from the DVC Webshop.
All prices correct at time of email but subject to change; errors and omissions excepted.