Evil Jedi

So I just ordered the Matrox CompressHD card.

I was able to check it out at NAB, and even though my guess is that we will get the same kind of acceleration with some GPU acceleration with Snow Leopard, I still find the need to use a computer as a transcoding engine for proxy needs, ipod/iphone output, versioning for audio sweetening.

But is the near realtime performance sacrificing the quality we love from the very timeconsuming software transcoders?
So, what is more important? Speed or quality? My feeling is that I will say yes to the most speed as quality allows me. My quality curve has a knee, while speed doesn’t!

And of course, this does not compare to the ElGato TurboH.264HD unit I use to compress my DVDs to AppleTV friendly QuickTime files!

AVC Ultra was released. We were sort of wondering where the 150mbit version of AVCIntra, that some of us have seen some years ago, had gone. Then the VBR codec at 200mbit+ called AVCUltra turned up with little or none warnings thru other channels.
AVCUltra story at www.panasonic.com

HPX-301 was released a bit before NAB, but is still quite significant. All though only 1/3 inch CMOS, the package is quite bulky. My guess is that the 20-bit processing draws half the 18 watts the camera uses. Therefore it would be impossible to make it a small camera, instead, it’s a shoulder camera with poor low-light performance but with brilliant imageprocessing.
HPX-301

P2 cards at sensible prices! OK, we have been waiting a while for this one… Pana changes some tech gear and say now slash prices to 1/3 of previous prices. There is some more to this story, but the general feel of it is: We’ve been screwing you for 5 years, but now Sony released EX1/EX3 last year, so we have to do something!
New not-so-much-of-a-rip-off-P2-cards!