Hooray For Hollywood

Hollywood Center Studios and NewTek create a virtual back lot

By Ian blair

Virtual sets have been around for more than a decade, but in an era of runaway productions and cutthroat tax incentives, they’ve never looked so good—both economically and aesthetically—thanks to lower costs and vastly improved technology. For a while, Hollywood once ruled supreme when it came to stages and back lots, and while the town may... Read more

Going The Distance

HDVideoPro examines companies and technology that enable productions to share media, ideas and workflows across the globe

By Dan Brockett

Executive producer Mike Young hangs up the phone in the production office and walks 20 feet to the soundstage door. As I follow Young through the doorway, a large greenscreen stage unfolds before us. The crew readies the next setup. Actors dressed in superhero costumes have their makeup touched up between takes. Two RED ONE cameras flank the stage,... Read more

The Right Tool For The Job

Canon EOS 7Ds capture the opening credits of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

By Neil Matsumoto

When director Pete Conlon of WUT IT IS (www.wutitis.com) met with Mirror Films (mirrorfilms.tv) cinematographer Vasco Nunes (Planet B-Boy, DiG!) to discuss shooting the opening credit sequence for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the producers were interested in using one of the latest HD DSLRs, but still needed some convincing. Since Nunes had experience... Read more

Beyond 1080p

Are we really ready for it?

By Skip Ferderber

It’s a simple question, but a fascinating one: What’s out there beyond 1080p? What should content producers, F/X artists and postproduction individuals know about the future, now that the 1080 high-definition revolution is all but settled? The question of whether technology simply must move into better/faster/smarter forms is a given; it... Read more

A Great Gesture

Reminiscent of the technology in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, could TAMPER be the new editing interface of the future?

By Dan Brockett

If you attended last year’s Sundance Film Festival, you might have had the opportunity to glimpse at the future of editing. The radical new technology that was on display was in a small booth, presented by a venture-backed developer of a new kind of human/machine interface, Oblong Industries. The promised glimpse of the future was provided by... Read more

A Unique Search Engine

Constellation VCM is poised to take tiered storage techniques to the next level

By Ian Blair

Constellation VCM (Video Content Manager) is the new, innovative integrated storage-management and archive-management system for professional video environments, developed by Media Distributors and SoleraTec, with an end-user interface that offers full search, retrieve and manipulation capabilities for video and project files, without touching the... Read more

Cut The Wire

New technology enables productions to capture high-def signals wirelessly

By Skip Ferderber

Let’s start with a caveat: This is not, for want of a better phrase, a technology article. Learning about the emerging age of HD wireless transmission primarily is about artistic freedom: to go anywhere, shoot anything in HD and not be encumbered by wires and cables. A second caveat: This is not about "TV." Now that HD digital video... Read more

Live On The Web

To reach a global audience, broadcasters look to the Internet to stream news, sports, music and other events

By Jeffrey Nielsen

If you haven’t had to consider streaming video as part of the high-def production process, you probably will soon. For example, last November, the MTV Europe Music Awards (MTVEMA) sent out over 800,000 live streams of the awards’ red-carpet wraparound show. You’ve probably pasted clips onto a website, but squeezing a video file down... Read more