From the magical CGI composites of Hollywood to the meteorologist pointing to an animated map, the one essential element that links them is the key. Perhaps you’d like to make your two-year old child appear like Godzilla on top of a neighborhood of unsuspecting barbecue dads. In the olden days

What do you do when you need more storage in a hurry, but are either reluctant to open your computer and install a new drive or need the ability to move your files to another computer? The easiest way, by far, is to connect an external hard drive to your computer. There are a wide array of drives on

$1,499 Matrox Video Products Group 1055 St-Rgis Blvd Dorval, QC H9P 2T4, Canada (514) 822-6000 www.matrox.com It’s a great time to be a video editor. Think of it: all of the major hardware manufacturers are racing to bring real-time, no-rendering-needed, professional-quality digital editing p

We cover lots of cool DVD gear and software in this magazine, but feedback from our readers reveals that while you love reading about all of this fancy technology, most of you just want to put your home movies on DVD. You aren’t really interested in capturing, editing, authoring and burning, e

Everyone seems to like animation, be it The Simpsons, Looney Tunes, The Critic or South Park. What used to be exclusively the realm of artists who had to hand-draw parts of each frame on acetate sheets and painstakingly photograph the completed project has been revolutionized, like so many other for

This time of year, our minds begin thinking of boxes with bows and finely wrapped packages. We go out of our way to make sure the gifts we give others look great. Your video productions, the products of many hours of hard work, should merit the same attention to detail when it comes to packaging. C

Take a moment to cast your mind into the recent past. Remember the last big Hollywood movie you watched? Remember the characters? How they made you laugh or cry, grab the seat in terror or turn your head in tense anticipation? Okay, now think a little more. How was the film edited? Did you notice an

If you are at all familiar with digital video and audio technology, you’ve probably heard or read the term MPEG (emm-peg) by now. This acronym, which stands for Moving Picture Experts Group, refers to a set of standards agreed upon by an international group of top-notch audio/video technicians

The editors at NFL Films are masters of the art of film editing and have changed the way that TV, film and video crews cover sports. To understand the significance of NFL Films and its 40-year history, it helps to view a football highlight film from before the company’s inception. Inevitably,

DVD+RW Alliance Demonstrates Dual-Layer DVD+R In a move to double the capacity of recordable DVDs, Philips and MKM (Mitsubishi Kagaku Media)/Verbatim have announced a version of the DVD+R recordable DVD format that includes two layers, allowing for recording of up to 8.5GB of data on a single disc.

Lil’ Fella Panasonic’s SV-AV100 is a compact SD Card camcorder that records JPEG photos, MPEG-4 video and DVD-quality MPEG-2 video. The unit features a 10x variable-speed optical zoom, electronic image stabilization and a 2.5-inch LCD viewscreen. The included 512MB SD card can record up

YesVideo Service Now Available at Walgreens YesVideo, the video- and photograph-to-DVD transfer service available through drug stores nationwide, has announced that YesVideo services are now available through Walgreens’ 4,200 US stores. YesVideo will accept any 35mm slides and prints; 8mm, Su

A lot of cool products come through our front doors. Some are complex and some are expensive. Bella Corporation’s new DV Keyboard is neither. In essence, the DV Keyboard is a full-featured, programmable keyboard with a jog/shuttle dial for video editing. Even more, the keyboard comes with a st

We’ve been working hard with Encore for over a month now. It is a good app for the non-Hollywood professional market, with its primary strength being its integration with Adobe’s other apps (Premiere, Photoshop, etc.). Encore is a Windows XP-only product. Macfficionados and Windows 2000-

Remember when $600 was a good price on a 13GB Seagate Barracuda A/V hard disk? Analog MJPEG capture rates needed 10,000 rpm drives that sounded like Everglades’ fan boats and were hot enough that the kids could use your PC as an Easy Bake oven when you captured video. Well, those days are long

$399 Matrox Electronic Systems 1055 St-Rgis Blvd Dorval, QC, Canada H9P 2T4 (514) 822-6000 www.matrox.com A year or so ago, you needed a Matrox card to have a dual monitor setup. With the explosion of LCDs that can actually fit on your desk, dual-monitor video display cards are now almost standard.

If you videotape events with multiple cameras, you can save time in post-production by doing live-to-tape multi-camera shoots. Graduations, dance recitals and sports are prime targets for a multi-cam shoots, but switching live to tape takes careful planning and special tools. This article will tell

Now that hard drives and DVD-R discs have entered the mainstream as consumer audio/video recording media, devices like Panasonic’s DMR-HS2 DVD Video Recorder seem a necessary evolutionary step in the development of hi-tech home video. Built to function as an all-in-one home video entertainment

If, as Edmund Burke asserted, "good order is the foundation of all good things," then good video production may spring from a bit of organization. In particular, an integrated method for naming things like shots, tapes, projects and files can save one from madness when it comes time to ass

Home-burned DVDs are not exotic anymore. In fact, for most professionals shooting weddings and events, DVD is a required distribution format. Some confusion still exists about the various flavors of DVD available to the consumer and how this affects compatibility. The good news is that we can clear