Splice Vine September Links

A lot has happened in the month since my last post. Black Magic Design buys Davinci, Avid Media Composer 4.0 is released, Apple releases Snow Leopard, and Canon announces a late-september early October release of EOS 7D. This is good timing considering all the excitement the RED cameras and the Canon 5D Mark II continue to elicit. Anyway, on to the links...

- For those that want to get ahead of the curve on the next media revolution 'Element Technica introduces groundbreaking steroscopic 3D production tools'. FxFactory also just released some stereoscopic plug-ins. Avid Media Composer started supporting 3D editing this year, but when Apple products start doing this naively people will really begin to take notice.

- Pro Video Coalition has a great blog post about round-tripping with Final Cut Pro and After Effects.

- Philip Hodgets has an interesting post that wonders if large post houses are heading for the editing graveyard. He expands on this in his latest appearance on Larry Jordan's podcast - Creative Planet Digital Production Buzz. I think the high-end niche focused Davinci Systems getting bought buy the broader market Black Magic Design is a good example of this. There continues to be a trend of moving away from expensive proprietary hardware-based ecosystems and towards open software-based ecosystems. You've got to wonder how much Magic Bullet and to a lesser extent Apple Color has been cutting into Davinici's margins. Broadcast Now talks in more depth about this in their latest post What is next for DI?

- Since I'm editing remotely more and more I want to find a good online backup / archiving solution. There's a good post on Drop Box vs Carbonite that explains how they seem similar but are for very different types of users. Carbonite is what I want to go with but it appears that they only back up internal drives. So people with a Drobo or external G-Tech drives (like myself) will be out of luck.

- Just discovered BuZZdex which is a resource database on Larry Jordan's site that displays articles, forums, tutorials and other resources for over 100 video, audio, VFX and animation applications.

- The iPhone storyboarding app Hitchcock has everybody talking. I'm rarely involved in pre-production anymore but this game-changing app makes me want to be.

- Yoostar is taking what Serious Magic (now part of Adobe) was doing to the next level. They sell chroma key kits that give you the tools to videotape yourself over a green screen and edit yourself into famous Hollywood films. They hired Snoop Dog and then shot and keyed him into movies where he is interacting with Marilyn Monroe, Dan Akroyd, Lou Costella and Cheech Marin. Genius.

- Great article on Augmented Reality in contact lenses. This is supposedly closer to being er...real than we think.

- A hack for getting Flash video on an iPhone. I haven't tried it yet but I hope it works.

- Oliver Peters has a really good post on audio post geared towards video editors.

- Digital Rebellion just released FCS Maintenance Pack. Now you no longer have to cobble together a bunch of disparate mult-vendor FCP utility apps. You can get most of what you need from one place in one box.

- And lastly, this is very exciting. I may actually be able to afford to finally create a Splice Vine iPhone app: And Now a Service to Roll Your Own iPhone App.