Notes On Video

I've been sitting out the HD Disc wars ( Blu-ray and HD DVD ) since a) if you can't buy any hardware, then why worry, and ii) with two competing formats, it looks like a party I want to stay away from. But then yesterday I was having lunch with a friend and I was telling him about the video I'd just finished and I was talking about how it would look better in HD because it was shot in HD rather than in the NTSC it had been downsampled to. And then I had this moment of realization; the HD Disc format I was going to go with would be determined by Apple; since that's the hardware I use for video editing. Well for some reason, suddenly I got all excited about the idea of creating an HD disc and was wondering which format (if any) Apple was planning to support. If I had to guess, it would be Blu-ray, since it's Sony and Apple and Sony have a bit of a thing going from way back. So today I did a bit of research; okay, I typed Blu-ray into a search engine and clicked on th...

Canon has announced two prosumer HDV camcorders; the XH G1 and XH A1 (MSRP $6999 and $3999, respectively). Wow! And the interesting thing; at that price neither accepts interchangeable lenses! Not being in the market for that kind of expensive camera at the moment, I can't really get excited. Canon has a habit of coming out with really cool semi-pro video cameras about a year or so after Sony, and by that time, I've already made my buying decision. Bad luck for me I guess - and I'm very happy with the Sony - but it's still a little annoying that they couldn't get in the game a little sooner.