New Products for Producers - Part VI

No, well maybe, yes. The Eye-Trek FMD-200 by Olympus is a device that looks and wears like a pair of opaque sunglasses. You connect them to a video and stereo audio source, an AC power adapter box and put them on. Inside the lightweight set, a complex pair of prism lenses splits a single, high density, LCD video monitor into two images, one for each eye. Hanging from the temples of the glasses are two ear buds that supply sound.

A simple popup help screen allows you to tweak all the usual monitor controls and the control box allows the user to input a password to prevent unauthorized use. For eye safety, Olympus has built in a 2 hour viewing limit. The unit shuts down for 15 minutes if continuously run over 2 hours.

The effect of viewing video through the Eye-Trek is awesome. Out there in front of you, about six feet away, hanging in space, wherever you turn your head, is a flat panel television screen! Olympus makes several models. The FMD-200 that we previewed displays a 52" screen, but other models, like the FMD-150W create a larger virtual screen (62" wide). You can operate the Eye-Trek sitting down, lying in bed, wherever. Looking hard, you can see the pixels of the little LCD screen, but they are no more obtrusive than the pixels of a plasma screen or 52" NTSC video projector.

My clients love this gadget! Sit them in a comfortable chair and play your show reel. They'll be singing your praises all the way home. The FMD-200 features a 180,000 pixel, 4:3 screen and is priced at $599. The FMD-150 features a 240,000 pixel 4:3/16:9 screen and is priced at $899. Such a small device might seem a bit pricey, but consider that the Eye-Trek is a lot cheaper than a similarly sized projection monitor and a lot more portable. Hey, don't bother me. I'm watching The Matrix.

No More Column Typing Headaches

I like to write my scripts in the vertical split page format; "Video" on the left and "Audio" on the right. In order to do this, I've used various word processing programs, set up in two or three columns (the third column to number the paragraphs). What a flaming mess. If you add a line to the Audio side, you have the carefully click over in the ;Video side and do a carriage return. Sometimes you lose synch between the columns and waste hours getting everything correct again.

Well, now BC Software - the same people who created the excellent feature film scripting program FinalScript - have developed Final Draft AV (recently updated to version 1.1) a word processing program specifically designed to do AV-style vertically split scripts. Compatible with Mac OS X, and all flavors of Windows, Final Draft AV is the final solution for those of us who do TV commercials, CDs, DVDs, staged events and business video.

The magic of Final Draft AV is that it preserves the relationship between the video and the audio on a scene-by-scene basis. Press the return key on the Video side and the corresponding Audio element is locked with the Video. In this way, scenes can be cut, pasted and moved with Audio and Video intact.

A complete, default header area, which allows for Agency Name, Date, Draft, Job Number and the names of key personnel. Beginning with the "View" window, the program allows the user to set up the script with a wide assortment of options. Users can opt for a 3-hole offset, for instance, or determine a preference to make either the Video or the Audio column wider than 50%. Resetting the parameters allows the user to convert the document without retyping the text.

Unfortunately, in our version (1.0), many of the View options did not work. We could not, for instance, type upper and lower case and the Video column always defaulted to underlined text. I would hope that version 1.1 corrects these bugs.

Final Draft AV easily imports text from other word processors and can quickly convert a client's version of a script into a professional AV format, ready for rewriting, in minutes.

Final Draft AV is not as robust in features as FinalScript. Character names, for instance are not automatically memorized and made accessible from a pull-down menu in the manner of FinalScript, nor is the formatting of Final Draft AV as intuitive as FinalScript.
I would also like to see Final Draft AV offer an export mechanism to output its files to popular word processing formats. Inevitably, an AV producer needs to send scripts to clients that are editable by the client, and few will be equipped with Final Draft AV.

With time, perhaps, Final Draft AV may grow to stand as tall as its sibling, but for now, it still represents a major advancement over any modified style sheet in MS Word.

Dub That Tape to a CD

Hey, how often have you wanted to take a video and whack out a quick CD version that could play on a computer or DVD player - a kind of VCR device for making CDs? I just got my hands on a Terrapin CD Video Recorder, which, for about $550, looks and works just like a VCR, only it makes CDs instead of VHS dubs.

It takes about two minutes to set this unit up - just like plugging in a VCR. The Terrapin will record any video or audio signal connected to its input jacks. The unit has both a digital coaxial and digital optical input, RCA and S-Video jacks, and can record NTSC or PAL, DVD, VCR, Air Signal, CD, PC, DAT, or DCC. You press the Record Video or Record Audio button and the CD drawer opens up. Pop in a CD-R or CD-RW disc, close the drawer and the LCD data screen recognizes the media in seconds. Using a standard, blank CD you can record up to 74 minutes of MPEG1 video with CD quality, stereo sound, or 74 minutes of stereo sound alone.

The Terapin will record to consumer CD-Recordable (CD-R) and CD-ReWritable (CD-RW) discs. In the recording session, you can set up multiple index points and continue to add new clips until such time as you "finalize" the disc. After finalizing, the disc will play on any CD/VCD player. Before finalizing, the disc will only play on the Terapin (much the same as computer based disc recording.)

Playback on the Terapin or any of my in-house computers was full screen, MPEG1, quality. Not quite VHS, but then, this is not a DVD recorder. Sound replication was excellent. Of course, the first thing I put on a CD was my show reel, which I then mailed to a client. In the course of one week, I ate up a stack of CDs on this activity alone!

Mac Schmac, I Got Fed Up

I finally got fed up one day, stopped everything I was doing, and got on the Internet to find a program that would convert Apple Macintosh files into Intel PC format. Thinking, "Enough is enough," I imagined that my first search would turn up dozens of solutions. Nope. There was only one. But thank heavens it was the right one.

Conversions Plus 6.0 by DataViz, for all Windows operating systems, is a $69.95, set-it-and-forget-it software device that makes any data, written on a Mac memory, available in Windows. Now don't misunderstand me. This software won't make Mac software, like a Mac version of Quark, run on Windows, but if you have a Quark file on a Mac-formatted disc, created in Mac and you're running Quark on Windows, this software will let you open the file in your Windows Quark.

Conversions Plus can convert files from different word processing, spreadsheet, graphic and database formats, so you can instantly see the work and edit them in Windows programs. Document forming, such as bold, italics and font sizes are also retained, saving you tons of work.

Do you ever get garbage text in an email, sent to you by a Mac user, or do you get compressed Mac files by email that can't be opened in Windows. Conversions Plus can also help with these, using a decompression and decoding routine. Hell, I'm grateful I can just read the file names to identify what's on a disk, but Conversions Plus gives you much more than that.

Install Conversions Plus in minutes and it resides in your RAM examining every floppy, CD, Jazz, Zip whatever that comes into your system. If you're involved in cross platform work, have vendors or clients who still use Macs, or even occasionally wonder what's on that full disk that reads, "unformatted," when you explore its contents, DataViz's Conversions Plus 6.0 is for you.

Faster Defrags

Executive Software has improved its popular Diskeeper software with version 6.0. Diskeeper, first reviewed in this column, is essential to Windows NT and Windows 2000 users because it allows users to defragment their hard drives. During the normal course of use, hard drives become fragmented by having files continuously written, erased and rewritten. This creates information gaps on the drive, which forces the computer to write files in smaller and smaller fragments that get stored inefficiently. A highly fragmented drive can lose more than 25% of its capacity and speed and eventually fail to work at all. Defragmenting with Diskeeper is simple and safe, resulting in significant improvements in performance. Diskeeper 6.0 vastly increases the speed of the process and also allows the boot sector of the drive to be defragmented - something that was never possible before. One caveat; If you purchase Diskeeper 6.0, be sure to buy version the SECOND EDITION (the boxes are nearly identical, so be sure to check carefully) which was a recent improvement on the original 6.0 release.

Warning Will Robinson!

Also from Executive Software, here's another breakthrough product to serve your computer. Have you ever had a hard drive fail in the middle of a critical project? If so, you remember the moment like the day Kennedy was shot. Now, you can get an advanced warning when a drive is nearing the end of its productive lifetime, nearing a fatal flaw, or just plain too stuffed with information to work properly.

Drive Alert works with AT, IDE and SCCSI drives, even RAID devises, by constantly monitoring each drive's performance according to a wide assortment of criteria, such as throughput speed, error count and hardware RAID card feedback. Drive Alert operates on individual computers or over a network. The program is a set-it-and-forget-it system, but sophisticated users can tweak the operations to highly specific parameters. Network administrators can install Drive Alert on an administrative server and monitor all the drives in the network!

When a drive starts falling below the established limit of errors or performance and alarm is sounded on any assigned computer. Alarms may be audible, text-on-screen, emailed or telephoned. Drive Alert even has a voice generator and audio recorder that deliver voice messages by phone to pre-determined telephone numbers.

More Digital Snaps

Hewlett-Packard has made significant improvements in its economical digital still camera, the PhotoSmart 315. Available at a street price of $299, the 315 offers 2.1 megapixels and sports a 1.8 inch viewfinder LCD.

One of the biggest drawbacks of pocket digital cameras is their propensity to eat up batteries. The cost of batteries ends up replacing film as the biggest expense of ownership. The 315 offers significant battery conservation capabilities, such as automatic shut down and a firmly snapping front panel that turns the camera on and off.
The PhotoSmart 315 can be carried in a tight backback or jacket pocket without accidentally activating itself and expending the batteries. It also comes with an AC power converter, which is an expensive option in many digital point-and-shoot models.

The PhotoSmart 315 sports a USB connector, and comes with easy to install software that makes uploading pictures simple and fast. I prefer to simply pop the 8 MB SanDisk memory chip out of the camera and insert it into a SanDisk CompactFlash PC adapter. The adapter slides into the side of the IBM T-21 laptop I use to write these articles and produce various media, appearing as a third hard drive.

Athletic Support

John Doran is a veteran New York sports and news cinematographer with a penchant for invention. For years, he has marketed a unique camera support device, called the Steady Stick, which he hand tools in his basement workshop. The Steady Stick fits nearly any camera and provides a flexible support for the shoulder-mounted camcorder. The Steady Stick is composed of a semi-rigid, telescoping stick that clips to the user's belt. At the top of the stick is a quick, disconnect fitting that fits into a finely machined interface plate. The interface plate snaps into the camera's tripod plate and provides a comfortable pistol grip that may be positioned across a wide range of angles.

With the Steady Stick transfers half the weight of the operator's from the cameraman's hands to the operator's waist and literally frees the hands for creative work. In addition, the Steady Stick adds tremendous stability to the camera, allowing higher quality shots at long focal lengths and long durations. All the networks are John's clients and he reports a steady stream of orders from cameramen around the world.