Twelve Things Every Geek Should Want for Christmas 2005
by Cutter Ubergeek Stevens

Well now dear readers, another year has past and another generation of technology has emerged. We've come a long way baby! All you video guy's have HD to deal with now.  And all you effect guy's are working in 2K resolutions.  In short, your doing things that you only dreamed of a year or two ago. Actually your probably not doing this right now, but I'm here to tell you that you can!  For much less money than you think. 

It's the holiday season, so I’m going to talk about what every Geek should want, and CAN get, on their wish list.  By "Geek" I mean, Video/Film Professionals, technical enthusiasts, etc. So don't be insulted.  The term Geek, which I am proud to say I am, has gotten an unwarranted bad rap.  So for all you fellow Geeks, here's twelve days of Christmas goodies for you.

1. On the first day of Christmas Cutter sold to me... A ProHD camera.  That is the JVC GY-HD100U camcorder and accoutrements.

This camera in it's standard package alone ($5495 includes Th16x5.5BRMU lens, viewfinder, mic holder, microphone, battery, AC Adapter/charge ) is great alone. But when you add the acessories, well then it becomes a F***ing great! For under $50,000 you can   have enough camera to shoot a film that could rival the quality of it's higher priced sisters from Sony (HDCAM) and Panasonic (D5).

I'll start with what makes it great and we'll move on from there.

• HD Focus Assist - HD is really hard to focus with the little viewfinders. In fact it's almost impossible. This little feature makes every shot the right one.
• A standard 1/3-inch bayonet mount - If there is one thing I hate it's proprietary lens mounts. I want freedom of choice.  Granted HD lenses are kind of expensive, you can rent them!
• One heck of a menu system - It's everything you would find on a Cinealta from Multi-level color temp adjustments to skin detail. As an added bonus you can save different parameter profiles (indoor, sunny, lolux etc.) on a simple SD memory card. Grab a few..start a posse!
• Shoulder mount - How stupid was that Sony gunstock!! HA HA HA HA HA
• Progressive Scanning - I for one never even want to see interlaced footage again!

There's more info on our website. The camera does a lot of cool stuff, we all know. I want to get to the gadgets that go with it!!! Lets start with the camera options:

• Chrosziel’s GY-HD100 KIT Follow Focus Kit - Matte box, French flag, 4x4 rotating filter stage, 4x5 fixed filter, Plus the follow gear kit!! Everything you need for around $4K 
• Schneider 4x4" Filter Kit (Consists of Neutral Density (ND) .9, Black Frost 1/2 and Circular Tru-Polarizing Filters) $400
• WCV-82SC Wide Angle Converter, for use with the standard 16:1 lens $595
• Anton Bauer Li-Ion Battery Package - Dionic 90 plus a charger/AC adapter $1200
• Fujinon 13:1 Wide Angle ProHD Lens - It's expensive, but it's REAL HD glass!! $10K
• ACM-12 1/3” to 1/2” Lens mount converter - so you can use your old lenses $745
• Century Optics S2000 Canon Prime lenses - I'm not absolutely sure when this will be available but they seem very confident about making a 1/3 inch mount for their Film Prime series in the very near future. Probably around $15k per lens. A definite rental item  ZGC currently makes a prime lens adapter for this camera for about $12K, the Mini35.

To complete the package... 

• Varizoom VZ-SPG-F Zoom and Focus, Lens Control Kit $1K
• Panasonic BT-LH900 8.4-Inch LCD Monitor with HD-SDI, SDI, Component and Composite Inputs $5K
• Hollywood-Lite / Varizoom FlowCam G.T. Stabilizer System  - $3K
• JVC/FireStore DR-HD100-80, Hard Disk Recorder HDD/DTE System with 80 GB Drive $1900
• Some kind of nice Bogen or Sachler tripod - $1K to $5K or so
• Hell, lets add a doll. I like the Indie Dolly which goes for around $2k, it comes with four sections of track as well.
• Lets not forget a BR-HD50U Pro-HD Recorder /Player to top off the list - $3200

Ok there you have it, just about everything you could ever need to shoot the film of your dreams, for a price you can imagine while sober and awake! And of course you can get everything from DV411. Salivating yet?

2. On the second day of Christmas Santa Cutter gave to me... DV411's Pro Edit HDV Laptops. (Models vary of course).

We've been putting these laptops together for awhile but now with the advent of WUXGA we are able to have a 1920x1200 resolution monitor attached to our laptops. 1080p, HA, these things will make you laugh at your 1080. Granted, we are still talking about compressed footage.  We can't have you guy's walking around with a 10 disk array, but for HDV nothing compares. I'll take you through the specs of my pic for the fastest machine. I think I might get 15 or 20 seconds of battery life but, heck that's what coffee shop outlets are for.

• 17" 1920 x 1200 WUXGA LCD, Super-Wide Viewing Angles -
• Pentium 4 3.8 Ghz with a 2 meg cache - I want to go dual core but alas they are too hot for laptops right now. But I think this will do.
• Quadro FX Go 1400 - Yes this laptop will also eat through your most complex Digital Fusion flow.
• Not 1 but 2 - 100GB 7200RPM SATA drives. Yes kids,  that's 200GB of internal storage.
• Not 1 but 2 - Double-Layer DVD±R/RW Burner with LightScribe Technology - Dailys anybody!!
• Internal Wireless 802.11b/g LAN and Bluetooth Card
• Built-In CMOS Digital Video Camera
• Built-In 7-IN-1 Flash Memory Card Reader
• USB2 & IEE1394
• 3 Port PCMCIA FIREWIRE 800 1394B card
• 100/240V Autoswitch AC Adapter
• Standard Carrying Bag with Strap
•  3-year warranty

Can you possibly imagine.. I don't care what you edit, composite, image or render, this will eat it up and spit it out. This particular laptop configuration is going to cost you around $6k, but it's Christmas!! Don't you deserve it? 

3. On the third of Christmas Cutter Santa gave to me...a HD DVD player.

The SRDVD-100 is an item everyone can use and afford. At a whopping $400 this guy will play all your HDV files, DIVX HD (you naughty downloader), and windows media. It has Component and DVI connectors plus you can hook it up to your network to play off your main system or even an external USB drive. Buy it!!!  You'll impress the hell out of your girlfriend, or your cat...MOM?  Yes you'll impress the hell out of mom too.

4. On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me… (I wish) HP XW 93000 Dual Core

I had my first run in with Opterons way back at NAB 2005 and I was in awe. That machine was at least twice as fast as it's Xeon competitor. Encoding was about 4 to 5 times as fast. Now I've got dual core!!! Now I want dual core!!! I actually have one of these bad boys coming in the shop in a few days for an Avid LiquidHD set up. My previous Opteron 252 ( 2.6Ghz)setup encoded and downcoverted a 9 minute HDV project to MPEG2 IBP in just under real-time (around 1: 1.05).  I figure the dual core processors plus the new 8.0 memory drivers are going to give us an added 40% minimum boost in performance. The best thing is that almost every third party software, hardware, anything, uses these systems for testing. It's a pretty sure bet that whatever you decide to shove in there you will have manufacturer certification to boot!!

Unfortunately for everyone they aren't the cheapest of machines. Nothing great ever is, but it's the end of the year and little Johnny was a brat so the only one you need to treat is yourself, dammit.

I'm picturing my dream system consisting of:

• 2 mouth watering Opteron 280 dual core processors
• 8 sticks of extra creamy 512GB ecc reg. Ram for taste
• 2 Nvidia 3450's SLI for some spicy heat
• Whip it up with a 74GB 10K system drive
• Add 2 TB (4x500GB) 7.2k Stat drives with a Raidcore controller
• A Double-Layer DVD±R/RW Burner with LightScribe Technology
• Simmer over a 1500 UPS because your going to need it

For more info on Dual Core check out my November newsletter article, Dual Core Now and the Future.

5. On the fifth day of Christmas... my true love gave to me (finally) Fusion 5!!!!!!!!!! 

Eyeon is finally shipping Fusion 5.0.  It’s neat and available right now. Fusion has been my favorite compositor for quite a long time. Now it's much more than that. It really does do everything from green screen to 3D animation. This is what XSI wanted to be but couldn't quite hire the right guys to build.

There is so much good stuff with Fusion I can't possibly list it all so I'm just going to send you to our Fusion 5 product page and the eyeon website.

Right now Fusion goes for $4495, but also available is the DFX versions which are module based. Get only the functionality you want, for the price you can afford.

6. On the sixth day of Christmas every geek should want....a Catalyst from Bluefish4:4:4

Ooooh la la magnifique!! It may not be as sexy as one of our custom machines, but when it comes to pure muscle....well there really isn't anything that's faster.

You want 2K, fine here's your 2K!!! This card gives you everything.  I mean EVERYTHING!! 12bit uncompressed 2K, HD and SD I/O. And better yet it has VGA monitoring so you won't have to kill yourself getting a monitor to view it. That really has been the rub hasn't it?  What the hell do I have to buy to view 2048x1556!?! With the catalyst that nice CRT monitor you thought you retired can come right out of the closet. And of course it has component and SDI as well.

You want more? Fine how about full 16 bit RGB colour support. When your working in 2K you're not going to want to waste precious CPU kernal on YUV conversion.

More??? How about realtime HDSDI overlay and keying coupled with realtime Hardware down and upconversion!?!

If you want a card that does everything this is the one for you. There's more info on our Catalyst product page. Exact ship date is yet to be determined but expected early 2006.

7. On the seventh day the Heavens rained down because Santa gave to me...VERY, very fast 4GB Fiber storage arrays.

Huge Systems MediaVault 4210 and Atto Celerity 42XS controllers are a match made in heaven. If any of you have spoken to me in the last six months you have heard me rave about this combo. This price/performance/capacity/ass-kicking goliath has stolen my heart. These days I am pretty much using this bundle exclusively with all my HD editing systems. I have tested it with Matrox Axio, Bluefish Lust, Decklink HD Pro, Avid Chrome, Final Cut pro to name a few, and it has worked flawlessly with all of them.

Let me just break it down to the numbers for you...in all of my benchmarks it has never sustained less that 500MB/s. Usually it's more like 600. That's enough for 2 realtime streams of 10 bit 1080i (usually around 240 MB/s. As far as my testing, no one is able to touch that kind of performance for anywhere near the price.

I'm going to give you a double present. Buy the combo, MediaVault 4210 + Atto Celerity 42XS  and save some duckets, at least $400 off our regular low low prices !!!

8. On the eighth day of Christmas Santa Cutter gave to me...a very low cost present for everyone--(geek and non geek alike) G-Mini's.

G-tech products work and work well. Sometimes, unfortunately, they work so well that occasionally there's a long wait to get them. I hate that pesky law of supply and demand (Adam Smith salivates in his grave every holiday season).

G-Mini is a very nice little gift for anyone in your life. They come in FW400, 800 and USB 2.0 flavors with sizes ranging from 40 to 100 GB. No bigger than your breast pocket and powered via whatever bus you choose. These little guys come in handy in almost any situation weather your into high tech espionage or just backing up your MP3 collection. But if you want to be geeky, they have a wicked fast 7200 RPM version that will give 40MB/s easy.

The 40 giger goes for around $150, I wouldn't mind one in my stocking.

While your at it take a look at the new G-raid Pro. I haven't tested or seen it but it looks like an item for next years list!

9. On the ninth day of Christmas Santa Cutter gave to me...Converters for all!!

Canopus is king when it comes to conversion. Whatever your I/O needs, Mac, PC or Linux, Canopus is there for you with a price that can't be beat. Sure you can go with the big boys. But, side by side with AJA, Aurora and Miranda etc. , Canopus converters measure up. I have a hard time seeing any quality jump.

Now you lucky kiddies, we have just lowered our prices. You can get the industry leading ADVC-110 for a measly $285. They're crazy with their price cutting!!! Need scan conversion...Twin Pact100 is only $535!! Our prices are insane!!  As crazy Eddie might say.  Regardless, these converters are great little boxes that will do the job and work with everything.  And for all you Avid users, the Canopus converters filled a big hole--something actually working with that darned Xpress software!  Come on, be honest. You and I both hate the MOJO.  This is the perfect and less expensive alternative.

10. Then the tenth day of Christmas rolled around and boy was I tired.  How much holiday cheer can one geek survive?  Then I saw Avid coming to their senses...My true love gave to me...Avid Liquid 7.0.

Since it's inception a few years ago I felt Pinnacle Liquid was one of the best edit software platforms around. Between great hardware scalability, a low low price, and the best feature set of any three programs, few could argue.  Then Avid went and bought Pinnacle and I despaired. What would they do to it!! It blows Express out of the water.  How can they not kill it?  For months I tore my hair out. Clients would call and ask, "Cutter, what's your favorite software?" I would always answer Liquid. BUT I don't feel comfortable selling to you until I'm sure of its future. I repeated this over and over again for months!! Arrrrgah.

Now I can finally say after 15 years,Yes!! I like Avid.....Liquid that is. 

11.  The eleventh day of Christmas came about and well, I just had to get back to work. Luckily Santa left me...an AXIO so I finished early!

The Matrox Axio is about as powerful an solution as one can find.  Seriously, This kind of functionality one expects from an Inferno or some such $500,000 unaffordable monstrosity. The Axio gives you full realtime full frame rate, full resolution playback.  So scaling, no compression, realtime 3d DVE's, realtime keying, realtime overlay, realtime colour correction, realtime speed changes, realtime everything. Plus I swear their offline 50 and 100Mb are so high quality I would be very tempted to skimp on the high speed storage and finish with them. It's got everything you loved from the Digisuite series on an HD solution and stable as a rock!  You never have a faster, higher quality edit session than with an Axio!

12. And finally, on the twelfth day of Christmas what I want all geeks to get from me...Training DVDs.

Yes, I know I ended with the same thing last year!! But none of you guys ever read the freaking manuals!!! I am so tired of answering all these bloody software questions, These days I almost make it mandatory with any new system.

Plus, these days everything's different, we have new versions of Avid and Liquid, the whole Adobe Suite is being revamped (I can't frigging wait until After effects 7). We have new versions of Digital Fusion, Boris, Scenarist, Squeeze it's more than I can keep up with so I know you can't.  What you need we can provide.  Consider it a present for your friendly neighborhood support professional, plus it's just going to make you better at your job so you can charge higher rates and save up for next years List!!!

There's a selection of training DVDs on our website and we can order just about every one in existence so give me a call.

So that’s it. Christmas list, done. If you’d like to take me up on my suggestions, I invite you to come out to DV Expo West, December 7-9 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.  DV411 will be partnering with Sorenson and Avid (booth #138) There will lot's of new stuff you've never seen Plus me!!!

Now it's time for my traditional sentimental closing words. Or maybe not.

It's been one hell of a year.  HD took of like a bat out of hell and kept me busier than I have ever been. (It's is now 8:30 and I haven't slept in 2 days, I know, I'm a wuss). Once again, I want to thank all our manufactures, distributors and especially all of terrific clients. If any of you find you find yourselves in LA drop on by, DV411.

As for me I am once again looking forward to a nice evening with a vintage bottle of Cabernet, perhaps a Dashiell Hammet novel and If I'm very lucky my girl will give me a massage. Now that's what I want for Christmas!

Happy Holidays!

Cutter Stevens
Technical Director
DV411
310-838-9000
cutter ( @dv411.com )