Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterFields & Frames
Jan 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
Will portable video devices really be a beachhead for content creators? Five unions representing actors, writers, and directors think so. Last October, just a few days after Apple announced its video iPod — along with a deal with ABC to allow downloads of shows such as Lost — a joint call went out from the East and West coast sections of the Writers Guild of America, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Directors Guild of America to “the responsible employers of our members,” urging TV producers to hold talks regarding compensation for this new generation of take-it-with-you-media. ▸ Ready or not, cell phone cinema looks like it's on its way. Advances in handset technology and the advent of faster connection speeds make it feasible. In 2005, Verizon cell phone customers could watch one minute-long episodes — mobisodes in the new parlance — edited from Twentieth Century Fox's 24 television series. Scottish filmmakers, meanwhile, have the Pocket Shorts Scotland film fund. Small budgets of around $5,200 go to artists to produce one-minute shorts for cell phone play. Europe's first film festival for movies shot with mobile telephones recently hung up in Paris. Under the rubric of the Pocket Film Festival, dozens of “films” screened, ranging from 30-second shorts to a full-length feature made in Rome. ▸ And just how do you get those movies onto cell phones? Paris-based software developer Actimagine has developed one way: its new video codec and DRM solution is claimed to deliver full-length, “full-screen” movies for playback in currently available smart phones, fitting a two-hour running time flick onto a 128MB memory card. In the UK, Sony Pictures Digital has released Spider-Man 2 and Monty Python and the Holy Grail on memory cards for mobile phones. ▸ But what about all of those regular TV viewers who might only watch the occasional movie? Isn't there some sort of cellcasting network for them? Relax. Some smart players — in this case wireless coding developer Qualcomm, its subsidiary MediaFLO USA, and Verizon Wireless — are there to fulfill that desire. In December, the companies announced one of the first cell networks. Verizon's customers will be able to access realtime mobile video over the new MediaFLO multicasting network. Scheduled to launch in 2006, the service will offer mobile TV and other multimedia over Verizon's CDMA2000 1x EV-DO-based broadband network, which tops out at 2.4Mbps. ▪ Want to share that movie with a friend or two without butting heads? Upstream Engineering is showing a prototype LED-based optical engine that will create a matchbox-sized projector. The Finnish company says its “photon vacuum” optical system funnels all the LED's available light into a compact stream to yield highly efficient illumination. ▪ Post haste: In December, GridIron Software introduced GridIron Nucleo, one of the first postproduction apps to take full advantage of the new multiprocessor and multi-core CPU technology from AMD and Intel. Nucleo turns multiple CPUs into parallel rendering engines for After Effects, says the company, speeding preview and rendering times, similar to its grid computing plug-in.
