Stay tuned for NAB 2013

After a hiatus from the trade show, I'm back for 2013 with a shopping list of companies and new tech to review hands-on.  RED has promised something big, LaForet just announced a new concept to camera stabilization, and Lite Panels just scored the most rediculous monopoly on LED lighting, setting the grounds for what will be a very interesting convention.  If you want to see anything in detail, leave it in the comments or (for those who know me) just send me a text.

Western Digital Ruined Hitachi

I am a HUGE fan of Hitachi hard drives...or at least I was.

Hitachi's have been affordable, very reliable, perform well under heat, easy to manage in a RAID, and affordable.  Did I mention it was affordable?  They were damn-near perfect.  I used to buy up Hitachi bare drives at 7200 RPM on Amazon with free shipping for about the same (or less) than a Western Digital Green...which is just all-around terrible.  IntelliPower?  IntelliSeek?  No, you don't know when or which video file I want to use, so keep the disk spinning like it should be so I don't have to deal with stupid beach balls!  (Final Cut editors, you know what I'm talking about)

In two months, it makes one year since Western Digital bought out Hitachi for something like $4.5 Billion USD.  Since than, it's been a nightmare to get a hold of any Hitachi hard drive.  For some horrible reason, the FTC said it was okay for WD to buy out one of only three hard drive manufacturers (essentially creating a duopoly), but then forced WD to sell all Hitachi's manufacturing facilities and technologies to Toshiba.  What does Toshiba know about making good hard drives? I don't know, I've never owned one.  Don't plan to, either.

Amazon stills lists Hitachi (now branded HGST) 3TB 7200RPM hard drives...for $200.  Not bad, until you see the Seagate and WD Greens listed for $130.  What the hell!?


Now it's affecting G-Technology (or so I assume, considering they are were creative-professionals-oriented).  I had been advising my company to use G-Drives for on-set and facility transport drives for years.  They are excellent drives, with high-quality internal electronics, especially when Hitachi had bought them out a few years ago.

A few months ago we had to purchase more G-Drives for a specific project, when the bomb had hit me.  Their assortment of USB 2/Firewire/eSATA connections have been replaced.  They REMOVED eSATA in place of USB 3.  Professional creatives out there, how many of your workstations feature/can easily upgrade to USB 3?  If you're like me, the answer is NONE!  Why the frick would you remove the fastest connection for the still-slowest next-gen connection?  Why not upgrade the USB 2 into a USB 3!?  Yeah yeah it's fast, blah blah...those numbers are burst speeds.  Copy 600GB in a single action and tell me it's done in an hour and a half.

So we had to buy these new G-Drives with FW800 as its fastest option.  I had them daisy-chained and began copying data somewhere north of 400 GB...until the drives disappeared after 500 MB.  That's M, not G.  It was so consistent, I showed it off to everyone in the office along with a word of warning.  The last drives to do that to me were MyBooks about 5 years ago...now who made those again?

I don't care if my assumption is right or wrong...I blame WD's consumerism on dumbing-down and ruining the best drives the film industry had.

Screw you Western Digital.  You too FTC for letting them get away with robbery.

Teradeck Cube

Everyone has been talking about the Cube for a while as a cost-effective and expandable HD monitoring solution.  Seeing the Cube in person was critical because of all the criticism it gets because of the lag.  So here's what it is and how it works.

The cube is a WiFi transmitter that creates a hotspot.  Devices like a laptop or iPad can join that network to view the stream.  With the iPad, because the software needs to decode the video stream, there is a 3-frame delay to the picture, and a video I have will show what that delay is like.  With a laptop, because of the much more powerful decoding, the delay is closer to 1-1.5 frames.  There is also a separate decoder that will output HDMI to go directly to a monitor, with the same delay as the laptop's stream.

The cube can be adjusted by a laptop, and if I remember correctly, there is either a streaming option (viewable through VLC) or a web-viewing option.  Because the broadcast is digital, the Cube can transmit to 2-3 devices before it degrades or drops the signal.  It comes in either an SDI or HDMI option only; not both.  The Cube is also one of very few products to run off of the RED's rear AUX ports, highly simplifying the camera setup.  There's also an option to power it off DV batteries.  In its newest form, it can also live stream through a Sprint 4G antenna, directly broadcasting the signal to the web where anyone with an internet connection can watch.

So what's this all mean?  If your a director, get this now if you can manage the lag.  Walking around with an iPad for a monitor is so shiek; talk about impressing clients and watching an HD signal instead of SD from that 4K camera of yours.  If your an AC,  forget about it, just pull focus by distance.  At $1000, the Cube really seems like a great value, and now you can get a little Angry Birds in-between setups without anyone suspecting a thing.

Cars + NAB?

So what happens when a gearhead goes to NAB?  He recognizes the Ford GT40 and Indy F1 cars in QNet and GoPro's booth and takes tons of pictures.  The footage from the GoPro mounted at the top of the F1 car by the way is incredible.

Promise Technology's Thunderbolt

Promise has introduced two concepts in the Thunderbolt line; a medium-sized hardware RAID option and a very unique interface to fiber networks.  Promise has always designed products leaning toward permanent installation, so its no surprise their concepts were 4 and 8-drive RAIDs that produced incredible speeds to a laptop.  They have a reputation for providing very powerful drive solutions, and these look to be no different.

While the fiber interface doesn't apply to me, or many with small-to-medium sized facilities, it is a great example of how versatile and powerful Thundebolt really is.  A small box converts the connector into a typical fiber cable, designed to give full-speed access to high-speed SANs.  There's no proprietary software to install; the box plugs in and the network drives simply appear as a drive.  Promise had a huge multi-drive multi-terabyte SAN setup as an example, and the data speeds clocked on a laptop were ridiculous; the fastest on any Thunderbolt setup I've seen yet.

Blackmagic Design's Thunderbolt and Rugged Mini Converters

Blackmagic Designs wouldn't be BD if they weren't pushing the edge of new possibilities.  They introduced the UltraStudio 3D, a Thunderbolt device that gives a laptop access to what a Decklink Extreme card does to a Mac Pro.  On their preview system, a laptop had a Promise Thunderbolt prototype 4-drive RAID and UltraStudio connected, and played back a 1080p uncompressed stream to a professional broadcast monitor.  All in a very simple setup.

BD also introduced a tougher version of their Mini Converters.  Not that the original designs had very many problems, these are just more accomodating for all the velcro and bashing that converters get while on-set.  Very handy.

G-Technology Thunderbolt proof-of-concept

G-Technology didn't really have a working prototype that is a possible shipping option; there has been a lot of feedback for a Thunderbolt solution, they just aren't sure which product will be the first with the new port.  In their display, they had actually rigged adapter cards and existing chipsets to convert a G-Speed eS Pro into a Thunderbolt cable.  The result?  Ridiculous speeds on a laptop.

The eS Pro shown is a 4-drive RAID 0 system, with a mini-SAS connector that's very popular on high-speed RAIDs.  Their proof of concept has definitely proven Thunderbolt has the capability of pushing data at incredible speeds, defeating connections that typically require an entire desktop tower.

Those speeds are real; it's nearly 1.5x faster than a certain 8-drive Mac Pro system I know...