March 10, 2009 by admin.

As part of my video production business I am often asked to pick-up a quick shot on video. Maybe we need some B-Roll for a documentary or footage for a PSA. Bigger projects usually require specialized equipment.

For a major worldwide real-estate developer we shot on the Panasonic HVX200 in HDV to a P2 chip. For a manufactured home community with a cutting edge concept and big budget we shot on a high speed 35mm film camera. We select the appropriate camera for the project. Since we can’t possibly have every camera in-house, we rent what we need, when we need it.

But we have to have something in house. Usually it’s a lower end camera that can take the abuse of laying around in our storage room. In the past it was a DXC series Betacam, then a DSR200 from Sony with it’s extra long record time. We even had a Panasonic DVX-100B. A camera to grab and go shoot without a lot of fuss.

So, lately I was searching for another camera to fill that bill. A grab and go that would not bring tears to my eyes when it took a scratch or bump.  I thought something around $2,500 that shoots to a solid state format like flash memory. I found the Panasonic AG-HMC70 3-chip AVCHD camcorder. Read the rest of this entry »

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March 8, 2009 by admin.

If you like watching movies, you probably have numerous movies. I have over 500 DVDs personally. For holidays and my birthday friends and family often gift me with movies. I watch and rewatch the movies in my collection. Although my system has a 5-disc player I would rather have all my movies in a central player system. I have owned lots of different player systems. Juke-boxes that hold hundreds of DVDs and albums to organize my collection.

Recently I have discovered the “Media Tank”. Manufactured by different companies Media Tanks use internal and external hard disc drives to store audio & video. These Media Tanks then display a menu of movies and music they contain for playback at your liesure. The screens are sortable and allow you to put your media files in easy to find folders.

These Media Tanks are sometimes called home media centers or media servers range from around $150 to as high as $500. In my case I was interested in archiving my extensive DVD collection. But DVDs come with menus and simply copying the main movie to a hard drive will lose the menus and special features. But I have found  “work-around” that will function to keep the entire menu and special features of each DVD. It is not all-together fully legal since it uses a program that has been litigated out of existence. Well, you can still find the program called “DVD Shrink” on Limewire. Not every DVD will convert, but I find most will.

The Media Tanks have the ability to play .ISO backups of DVDs created by DVD Shrink. These .ISO files are around 4 Gigs in size and maintain all the features of the original DVD.

Captions, alternate endings, picture angles and multiple languages all can be accessed from the .ISO file just as they would have on the original DVD.

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March 2, 2009 by admin.

I am a self proclaimed tech junkie. I buy stuff that entertains me. TV sets entertain me a lot. So I bought a gi-normous 65″ Plasma for my living room and a 52″ LCD for the family room. I actually bought the Plasma set about a year and a half ago when the prices were dropping on plasmas.

A lot of people thought Plasma was old tech. They thought LCD would “replace” Plasma as the latest bestus way to watch TV. Now lots of people have taken a new look at big screen formats and found that LCD may not be the best choice for the home theatre.  Having looked at a lot of sets I have to throw my two cents into the fray. Read the rest of this entry »

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