Week of Dec 21 1998   Dec 24 At the Sorenson company website there is a QuickTime Compression Tutorial for the Sorenson Video codec. The tutorial offers tips on creating the best possible QuickTime video. Much of the discussion focuses on the Sorenson Video Codec and the QDesign Music Codec, but it also provides tips on video production that apply to all compressed formats as well as a full discussion of audio compression. Meanwhile, Sorenson Video 2.0 is expected to be shown at MacWorld in January. <www.s-vision.com web page "Tutorial">   GRAPHICS MetaCreations will release on Jan 1 Kai's Photo Soap 2, a new version of Kai's creative photo-editing software. The company claims that it's designed for anyone with a camera and a computer to effortlessly bring their photos to the Web for sharing with family and friends [though my own experiences with Kai's software suggest that while it might look dazzling, ease-of-use is never a priority in MetaCreations UI design -Ed.] Available for both the Windows and Macintosh platforms, Soap 2 comes on a hybrid CD for $49.95. <www.metacreations.com>   CNET reports that Live Picture has cut jobs, restructured, and it's chief executive, Kate Mitchell, has resigned. Live Picture's LivePix technology allows users to zoom in and out of an image and do edits at different layers of the image. They also have a 360-degree panorama technology Reality Studio. <www.news.com article "Live Picture out of Focus"> <www.livepicture.com>   ICE makes hardware acceleration equipment that works primarily with video effects software. Their BlueICE card consists of eight Philips TriMedia processors, with a combined compute power of over 3.2 Gflops. This would be roughly equivalent to eight 400mhz Pentium II processors. All processors are connected to a common bus, which allows them to share data and maximize the speed of rendering. The card alone costs $3,995.00 and you must then purchase additional software plug-ins for the applications you want to accelerate. Last month ICE released ICE'd Motion Tracker for Commotion, an add-on module for Puffin Designs Commotion realtime playback, paint and rotoscoping tool. It costs $299. Motion tracking follows an object or an area of an image, such as a baseball thrown in the air, as the object moves across multiple frames. Tracking data created with ICEíd Motion Tracker then can be exported to After Effects, Flame, A/W Composer, or Stratasphere for further finishing. <www.iced.com>   Dec 23 DISKS Iomega Corporation says that Varo Vision has signed a letter of intent to build the Clik! drive into their Digital Pocket Solution (DPS), an MP3 audio recorder/player with an electronic address book and voice recorder. Varo Vision expects to begin offering the DPS product in 1999 at an estimated street price under $300 (U.S.) The Clik! drive has only become available in the past couple of weeks and is being pitched at portable uses such as digital cameras. <www.iomega.com>   Ex'pression Center for New Media, a new digital visual media and sound arts career training center located in Emeryville, CA, will be including DVD production training in its curriculum this coming January. The Center is using Sonic DVD Creator as the tool to prepare its students for DVD production work. The Ex'pression Center for New Media is the first DVD training facility of its type in the United States. <www.sonic.com>   Panorama Tools 1.5 final for Mac and Windows is now available. Panorama Tools is a QuickTime VR editing tool. This version includes: Step-by-step tutorial on creating spherical panoramas and large vertical FOV QTVR-panoramas (without using hemispherical lenses). Stitcher Facility added to read marked feature points from images. <www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch>   Dec 22 CD-ROM Reader Dave Seah pointed out that a more recent version of Andy McFadden's CD-Recordable FAQ can be found at: <www.fadden.com/cdrfaq>   Berkley Integrated Audio Software, Inc. (BIAS) has announced version 2.0 of Peak, their digital audio editing software for the Apple Power Macintosh. Peak 2.0 adds support for playback and recording through DAE, enabling Peak to run seamlessly on all Digidesign hardware that supports DAE. Additionally, Adobe Premiere audio plug-ins can now be used in real-time within Peak 2.0. SMPTE synchronization has been added, and Peak 2.0 supports encoding MPEG-3 audio, Shockwave audio and RealAudio 5.0. A Pencil tool has been added for sample-level editing, and includes a smoothing option. BIAS has also included the ability to burn audio directly to CD from within the Playlist in Peak 2.0, and most popular CD burners are supported. Peak 2.0 has an MSRP of US$499.00, upgrades from version 1.5 - 2.0 are US$129. Upgrades from older versions of Peak are $279. <www.bias-inc.com>   Toshiba's megapixel digital camera, the PDR-M1, was recently named to WINDOWS Magazine's WinList and PC World editors picked the PDR-M1 as a "Best Buy'' in a round-up review of digital cameras in the magazine's January 1999 issue. The PDR-M1 provides 1280 x 1024 resolution, a 2x digital zoom, 1.8-inch LCD, and a four-mode flash and a list price of $499. <www.dsc.toshiba.com>   SHOWS Thinking of spending money before the end of the year? Don't forget that Consumer Electronics Show (ICES) in Las Vegas, is on January 7-9, 1999 and there's bound to be some cool new toys shown there. And at MacWorld in January Apple will show new hardware too.   The preview release of RealPlayer G2 for Macintosh"pre-Beta" is available now. Most of the final functionality is in this preview version, however it hasn't been optimized for performance or stability. The following system requirements are listed: Macintosh* OS 8.1 or higher 32 MB RAM 604 PowerPc* (200 MHz or better) Internet connection Browser support: Microsoft* Internet Explorer* 4.01 or higher or Netscape* 4.05 or higher Just to underline how unoptimized the player is, they "suggest using the Player with at least 65 MB of virtual memory" <www.real.com/products/player>   ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING IBM has standardized on Blue Sky Software Corporation's RoboHELP HTML Edition 7.0 for development of documentation for its corporate intranet. IBM plans to move all their operational procedure guides from standard Microsoft Word documents and paper manuals, to electronic intranet information systems. RoboHELP HTML Edition 7.0 allows users to create HTML-based Help files from existing Word documents, HTML pages, WinHelp files, graphics, and multimedia. RoboHELP HTML Edition has a list price of $499. <www.blue-sky.com>   Kona Systems has announced KonaVision, which enables two or more people to share graphics objects using standard Web browsers in real time. These images can come from scanned documents, captures of the desktop or web graphics, but the software also interfaces directly to digital cameras. The initial release of KonaVision provides direct support for the Nikon CoolPix 900 and Kodak DC210 camera series. Other digital cameras are supported via software provided by the camera manufacturer. KonaVision is available on a limited beta-release basis. Interested participants should contact Nancie Bonstedt at Kona Systems by calling 888/KONA-670. Further information is available at their website. <www.konasys.com>   Dec 21 CD-ROM CD Burner Blues, Greens and Yellows. For the last couple of weeks I've been having problems with CDR discs that have not been readable in some CD readers. Of course, all the machines that have been unable to read the discs have belonged to clients, and there have been no problems reading discs using our own machines! Because of this, it's been difficult to isolate the problem because we're more desperate to get a working disc to the client than conduct an exhaustive study of the problem. Our suspicion is that it is a media problem. We gave a client discs burned using HP media, and they were unreadable on one machine, and barely readable on another. We then used TDK media, which produced readable discs, though there still seemed to be a lot of read errors (particularly noticeable when playing video.) We then tried some Imation discs which the client had previously had no trouble reading. Unfortunately, this latest test didn't work. So if you're using CDRs, keep in mind that you should check a sample of the media before you switch brands because your reliability may change. A source for information of CDR media, software and drives is: Andy McFadden's CD-Recordable FAQ <www.astronfx.com/tips.htm>   ELECTRONIC DOCUMENTATION PDFzone.COM is hosting an expansion of the testing of Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 BETA software. Detailed information, including a Beta Project FAQ, is available at pdfzone. Interested participants will need to download, print, complete and fax to Adobe a signed confidentiality agreement form to Adobe before being allowed to download the beta software from PDFzone.COM. <www.pdfzone.com>   Documentation for the Macromedia Director 7 Server is still missing. This is really frustrating, because I have the server software but don't know what to do with it. Messages to Macromedia haven't provided any help so far. <www.macromedia.com>   MacWorld carries an article covering how to use FileMaker as a post production tool for logging your footage and creating batch-capture lists. Personally, I'd rather use a video editing application to log video and then be able to automatically capture clips, but that requires better hardware and software than most of us can afford. <www.macworld.com article "FileMaker Does Video">   Zygote is giving away FREE Poser 3 models over the next few weeks, one at a time. Each model will then be available for sale individually. A cartoonish Santa is available until Christmas, and this week's model is a gremlin. <www.zygote.com>   SHOW Documation '99 West Exposition & Document Software Conference will be held February 9-11, 1999 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Documation is focused on technology for the creation, management, and delivery of dynamic content for business applications with four major tracks; content management & Intranet/Extranet publishing, document management, XML business strategies, and knowledge management. <www.capv.com/Documation/Index.html>   ELECTRONIC BOOKS An article about Electronic Ink appears in San Jose Mercury News. Electronic Ink is the idea of applying a special surface to a sheet of paper (the ink) which can change it's appearance. So a page could "display" the text of Romero & Juliet now, and then change to the text of New York Times. E Ink, based in Cambridge, is developing just such a technology, based on research by Joseph Jacobson and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A paper at IBM's website covers this technology. <www.mercurycenter.com article "Electronic Ink"> <www.media.mit.edu web page "Joseph Jacobson"> <www.ibm.com paper "The last book">   Review of HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon on DVD Buz Box review Fuse review Canon XL1 review DV codec tests | Multimedia Workshop | Industry News | Online Reference | Contact Us | Find | Copyright 1998 by Multimedia Workshop. All rights reserved Send news or comments to : news@m2w.net All trademarks, service marks, and graphical logos appearing on this website are the property of their respective owners, and are used for identification purposes only. No endorsement of Multimedia Workshop by the trademark owners is intended or implied.