What just happened to video on the web?

We are extremely excited to announce that DV Kitchen, the ultimate solution for publishing professional quality video on the web, is available immediately!

Click here to find out all about it and watch the new movies!

DV Kitchen’s primary focus is encoding and uploading broadcast quality, internet-friendly-bandwidth video to a website, blog, forum, or for a video podcast. You can import movies, encode them, and upload them in as few as two clicks!

Features:

• Spectacular quality video encoding
• Integrated FTP uploading
• SampleLab™
• TimeFreezer™
• Bitrate Budget Calculator
• Batch image resizing, encoding and uploading
• Automatic HTML tag and complete page generation
• 20 day free trial, purchase from within the application

Download the free trial and you’ll be cookin’ up some delicious video within minutes!
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dvcCast! is discontinued, and we are very happy to say DV Kitchen is a FREE UPGRADE for all owners of dvcCast! No typo, that’s FREE as in NO CHARGE. (Hey, no one ever said we don’t take of our customers  )

(To upgrade, just download the free trial and run it.)

DV Kitchen has all dvcCast!’s features, then adds a bunch. Check out the FAQ for the highlights.

Click here for the main DV Kitchen page, with the overview movie, and links to all the other pages and movies.

The DV Kitchen Bitrate Budget Calculator is a sophisticated modeling algorithm that takes five factors into account to help you determine what your movie’s bitrate limit should be based on your particular situation.

When Flash first incorporated video in version 6, they chose the “Spark” Sorenson 3 codec. A good choice, that was the best encoding quality at that time. In the following years, several companies developed encoding algorithms that were clearly higher quality.

Flash 8 then added the On2 VP6 codec, which again delivered higher quality at lower bandwidth.

Because of so many viewers had the Flash plugin, a couple years ago web video encoders found they could encode video into Flash rather than the triplicate of the past (Windows Media, Real, Quicktime).

But with the release of the H.264 standard there was still one more shoe to drop. H.264, as we predicted when we first saw it, will become the standard for web and DVD encoding, due to its unprecendented quality and low bandwidth. Apple talked YouTube into re-encoding videos into H.264 for compatibility with the AppleTV and iPhone.

Adobe has now announced that Flash will handle H.264 video, allowing web encoders both the advantage of the highest possible quality and compatibility with the widest number of viewers on all three platforms. Flash will also play AAC audio, a higher quality codec than MP3.

Adobe is smart- Flash is still everywhere on the web, but if they took a course of ever more proprietary non-standards, Flash would eventually go the way of Real and Windows Media- still out there but I doubt we’ll see any in a couple years. This keeps Flash as a good choice, often the best choice for authoring rich media web experiences.

Tinic Uro, an engineer on the Flash Player, shares some insight here.

Flash Player 9 beta is available now, here.

Have you ever found yourself changing the file names of a whole folder of clips, graphic or other files on your hard drive one by one? Here is a Warp Speed Workflow showing how to change hundred of files names in one click.

Click here to ask a question about Final Cut Pro workflows.

For more info, check out:

Final Cut Pro Foundations

Final Cut Express Foundations

Notable points:

• Final Cut Studio 2 will be available in May for $1,299, or $499 for the upgrade
• Final Cut Pro 6 has an Open Format Timeline that lets editors mix and match virtually any video format and frame-rate in a single Timeline without transcoding. Hope this works with nesting and media management!
• ProRes 422 format for uncompressed HD quality at SD file sizes and support for mixed video formats and frame rates in a single Timeline- nice feature. ProRes 422 will run at about 18-20 MB/sec (normal quality) or 27-30 MB/sec  (high quality) for HD, or 5 MB/sec (normal) to 8 MB/sec (high quality) for SD. So, 6 – 10 times more hard drive space than HDV, but faster rendering and editing (because it’s all I-frame, no B-frame)
• Livetype is still included
• The ability to edit Motion templates with video drop zones and editable text fields directly in Final Cut Pro- this could be a real timesaver.
• Motion 3 has a "multiplane" 3D environment, meaning not true 3D, but flat layers in 3D space, lit by 3D lights and "shot" by cameras that can move through 3D space, like After Effects, which is cool. Individual (flat) letters can move in 3D, and even cooler, 3D particle systems, which could be rotated in tandem with the camera moves of the underlying footage, leading to more realistic composited particle effects.
• Motion 3 has vector based paint tools to allow editors to create brushes with color, particles, video or pictures.
• A motion tracking feature, if it works well, will be very useful.
• You can now use audio volume and frequency to affect any affectable parameter
• Optical Flow retiming means generating inbetween frames that could produce very smooth slow motion.
• From Apple’s Final Touch acquisition comes Color, a separate program with more advanced color grading than Final Cut Pro’s 3 way Color Corrector. The primaries in Color include advanced color correction tools such as gamma, lift and gain adjustments, as well as custom R, G, B and luma curves, and the secondaries provide the ability to isolate specific areas of an image with soft- edged mattes and custom-shaped vignettes. This was a $25,000 program, then $5,000 that is included at no charge in the Studio bundle.

  Professional scopes provide precise monitoring of chrominance and luminance values via waveforms, histograms and new 3D scopes. Color offers a seamless roundtrip workflow where projects can be sent from Final Cut Pro 6 directly to Color for grading, finishing and final rendering with 32-bit float 4:4:4 image processing.

• Soundtrack Pro 2 adds an interface upgrade and surround mixing tools enable users to create 5.1 and stereo mixes in the same project.

  There’s also a royalty- free library of over 5,000 professionally produced foley and sound effects, including over 1,000 surround sound effects and evocative multi-channel music tracks. A powerful new Conform tool enables users to synchronize and track changes between
  picture and sound editorial.

• Apple today also introduced Final Cut(R) Server, a powerful new server application that works seamlessly with Final Cut Studio 2 to provide
  media asset management and workflow automation for post production and broadcast professionals.

Final Cut Studio 2 – Upgrade from Final Cut Studio

Availability: Ships in May
Price: $499.00

Final Cut Studio 2 – Upgrade from Final Cut Pro 1,2,3,4 or FCP HD

Availability: Ships in May
Price: $699.00

Final Cut Studio 2 

Availability: Ships in May
Price: $1299.00

There have been many people trying to import various types of video files into Final Cut Pro- H.264, MPEG1, Sorenson, AVI etc. Sometimes the clips might sputter through… but often, they’ll redline and not play at all- or even crash the program, and possibly corrupt your project file.

Download the free trial of DV Kitchen! to batch convert video files to DV or any other editing format.

Bare Feats is at it again, with speed tests of the new Core 2 Duo MacBook Pros:

Features: