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The human eye is an incredible instrument. It has the ability to process a very high range of colors and even a larger range of luminance variations. Indeed, when we […]

If you've ever been to an Apple Computer press conference or keynote speech, you know they can have an atmosphere that's similar to a religious revival, with cheers and applause […]

It's been about a year and a half since JVC's consumer division introduced a camcorder, the GR-HD1, able to record High Definition Video (HDV) onto a MiniDV cassette. And, it's […]

As most content creators know, until a few short weeks ago, there had been a two-year war raging (five years if you count the pre-product, pre-emptive volleys) for the future […]

When I was a kid, my family visited Universal Studios in Hollywood. That was back in the early 1970s--the era of mechanical monsters, rubber scars, and Styrofoam boulders. I recall […]

If you've ever been to Las Vegas's McCarron airport, you can't have missed the audiovisual theatrics showing on the huge monitors above the baggage claim area advertising the wealth of […]

Just last month, Avid's pending acquisition of Pinnacle Systems seemed sure to be the video industry story of the year. It's a major shake-up that smartly positions Avid to broaden […]

For someone who's been following the digital video industry for a long time, Avid's recent agreement to purchase Pinnacle Systems feels like a blockbuster. These are two of the biggest […]

The first product review I ever worked on, some 11 years ago, was a roundup comparison of 22 different Windows 3.1 video capture cards. Only the top two or three […]

Undeniably, high definition is becoming increasingly prominent in just about all areas of the video production world. Maybe it's due to the FCC's mandated migration to digital television. Maybe it's […]

If you're not that familiar with HDV, it would be both a little surprising and completely understandable. After all, over the past year HDV has become one of the video […]

Broad feature integration has been a clear trend among non-linear video editing vendors during the past several years. Effects generation and multitrack compositing have become regular, expected parts of any […]

Compositing. It's arguably the part of postproduction in which the graphic artist meets the videographer. Compositing is about designing the frame, and building and layering images. Simplistically, whereas video editing […]

One of the most exciting trends in digital video editing this year has been the facility to do high-quality work without needing special capture or processing hardware (see "Beyond the […]

There was a time, not too many years ago, when Webcasting was all the rage. It was during the dot-com craze, of course, when the Internet and Internet distribution seemed […]

When it comes to next-generation monitors, digital content professionals know that thin is in. But as they explore which technology is right for their specific applications, they find that the […]

Here's a trivia question: What digital media technology has gone from highly exclusive and price-prohibitive to consumer-level the fastest? Many could make a good argument for 3D OpenGL hardware, which […]

With Media Composer Adrenaline, Avid, for the first time, exploits today's multi-gigahertz CPUs rather than relying on dedicated hardware cards. At the same time, Avid has dropped prices considerably. Its […]

There was a time, back when anything creative was done on a Mac, that any serious computer-based, non-linear video editor would have been Apple-based. That was before the great Wintel […]

This article reports that Avid Technology Inc.'s pending acquisition of Pinnacle Systems Inc. seemed sure to be the video industry story of the year. It's a major shake-up that smartly positions Avid to broaden its customer base and remain the dominant video-editing manufacturer moving forward. Yet early on the first day of NAB2005, Adobe dropped an even bigger bombshell, and announced that it is acquiring one time archrival Macromedia Inc. Arguably, the Avid-Pinnacle merger will still have a more direct effect on higher-end digital video professionals than Adobe buying Macromedia. But at slightly less than a half-billion dollars, the Avid-Pinnacle deal can't touch the 3.4 billion dollars Adobe is paying for Macromedia. Nor does Avid-Pinnacle ultimately reach such a potentially broad cross section of users, including those working in digital video, digital graphics and animation, and publishing, both print and online. Macromedia was the original developer of what is now Apple's Final Cut Pro, but it could not sustain a lengthy development cycle that increasingly came to be a distraction to its core products.