secondchairvideo | a growing blog for learning about video

700 MB/s Video Editing Held In Your Hand

700 MB/s Video Editing Held In Your Hand

LaCie’s tiny Little Big Disk houses two 250GB solid state drives in a striped RAID that provides a half a terabyte of data, is bus powered, provides 700MB/s read/write speeds and weighs about a pound and a half. Startling??? The details of this amazing ThunderBolt based portable hard drive solution, expected later this spring are at the company’s website. The device supports daisy-chaining by including two...

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What A Difference A Port Makes

What A Difference A Port Makes

The devil was in the details in the release of Apple’s new MacBook Pros on February 24th. Faster, sleeker, more powerful were the touted benefits, but the new Thunderbolt™ port (read Lightpeak) is the real winner. The port is the marriage of display port and PCIe technologies, can transfer data in its current iteration at 10 Gbps of throughput in both directions. It’s up to 20 times faster than...

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Convert DSLR Video To Use In Final Cut

Convert DSLR Video To Use In Final Cut

MPEG Streamclip is a powerful free video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows that is used to transcode video from one format to another. It will work with just about any video codec or file format, including DVDs and Windows media. Remember, however to observe copyright and DRM requirements. Many of you are already using MPEG Streamclip or have heard of it. If you don’t have it, download it...

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Premiere Pro CS5 Review

Premiere Pro CS5 Review

The performance of any engine is dependent on the sum of its parts. Nothing proves the point more clearly than the engine that powers Adobe’s Premiere CS5 Macintosh. A rebuilt, but familiar Premiere CS5 coalesces three key technologies into the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine to facilitate a powerful editing environment for today’s demanding video codecs. As a 64-bit application, Premiere can access as much RAM...

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Panasonic HDC-TM700 Review

Panasonic HDC-TM700 Review

It is unusual when marketing hype matches reality; more so when “full HD” is the primary selling point. After spending ten days evaluating Panasonic’s recently released HDC-TM700, I’ve had a change of heart — due in part to one new and one improved selling point. The 3MOS 1/4-inch cam is a half step faster than previous versions, and produces surprisingly good footage in challenging low light...

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Photoshop CS5 For Videographers

Photoshop CS5 For Videographers

The release of Adobe’s Production Premium CS5 bundle brings a refined interface, dozens of under-the-hood improvements and several “wow” features to the integrated application suite. This series of reviews will evaluate what is new, improved, and useful in CS5 Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, and onLocation CS5 Mac with video professionals in mind. Also in the queue is a look at the Adobe Mercury...

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Reinstall OSX & Final Cut The Right Way

Reinstall OSX & Final Cut The Right Way

Introduction. A common concern of Mac video users is how to quickly reinstall Mac OS X and associated applications while preserving settings, documents, and other important data. If a boot drive is failing, or the OS or applications don’t work reliably, many users understandably resist a clean install. The approach is perceived as taking too much time, and there are fears that data will be lost. Instead, many...

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News & Comment

Welcome to secondchairvideo.com, a growing blog devoted to recent news, information, tutorials, and product reviews for video professionals. Although we are Final Cut Pro based, we try to provide information about a wide spectrum of products, Mac and PC based. We recommend, however, Final Cut Studio 3 with Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Cinema Tools, Compressor 3.5, and DVD Studio

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Product Reviews

This site hosts hardware and software products reviews specific to video production. They include the latest products useful for Mac based video editors including Adobe CS5 Production Suite, and hardware products such as Matrox’s CompressHD blu-ray™ and h.264 accelerated encoding board. Please visit the menus above to access these, and other product reviews from various companies.

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Tutorials & Instruction

We author our own and with the permission of others, host a number of tutorials. We have a series on installing Mac OS X using best practices, and include secondary tutorials on creating a Mac OS X and applications bootable hard drive that will include all your data and settings. In addition we have a series of tutorials on transcoding non editing video codecs into editing formats

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