I just received a dispatch from Brandon, a friend of mine lucky enough to be at the NAB Show in Nevada this week. He’s going to be sending in some items of interest to share from the convention this week. Here’s what he had to say about Day One:
“The National Association of Broadcasters annual convention is a massive event filling all four halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Having spent an entire day thoroughly exploring just one of the halls, I’d like to share a few items that caught my eye:
1. Logic Keyboard Refresh
First off are new keyboards offerings from Logic Keyboard. Switching from the old G5-style Apple keyboards to the newly redesigned Apple USB slim style, Logic Keyboard provides input devices with shortcut markings for many major creative applications such as Photoshop, Final Cut, Aperture and Avid. If your are frequent user of any of these programs but haven’t yet memorized the shortcuts, these keyboards are an excellent visual aid. The new style keyboards will be shipping in about a month and will maintain the previous model’s $50 price markup over the standard Apple keyboard.2. Flip4Mac News
Next, I’d like to share a little information I received from a Telestream rep regarding Flip4Mac. Since upgrading to Leopard, I've been experiencing serious problems with WMV playback. When trying to play any WMV file larger than 7-8MB, I get a status bar, the “spinning beach ball of doom” and a very, very, long wait. I’ve posted over various forums looking for help with this issue but it appeared I was the only one experiencing it. Thanks to the very helpful Telestream reps, I learned today that mine is not an isolated occurrence and they have received reports from many other users with same or similar issues. According to them, it is a (currently) unresolved conflict between Flip4Mac and any version of QuickTime more recent than 7.4.1. So how do you fix it? At this point the only options are to roll back QuickTime to 7.4.1 or live with it in the hopes that the next QuickTime update does the job. An ideal solution this isn’t, as many of the changes in the recent QuickTime updates are critical security fixes. I should point out that, as a long time user of Telestream’s professional products, I have found the company to be very quick at resolving issues I've had. Initial problems that arose after the release of Leopard resulted in an update within two or three short days. I’m confident that if a fix is not available in a reasonable time that the issue is beyond their control. My next conversation about it will be with Apple.3. New offerings from LaCie
Last note of interest for today is a preview of new portable hard drive offerings from LaCie. Large capacity, small form and bus-powered! Everything a road warrior media producer could ask for! A new model of the Little Big Disk Quadra gives you 500GB from two drives in a RAID 0 configuration for read/write speed with eSATA, FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 connections to get all that data to and from your computer. If you’re running FireWire, you will won't even need the included power brick — so you end up with a package that would fit in my overly style-conscious girlfriend’s Italian purse, with room for all the mysterious things she carries in there! Of course, if you’re afraid she might hit you with said purse, as I often am, you may choose to go with the new Rugged Hard Disk with rubber bumper that surrounds a metal enclosure containing a shock absorber-mounted 320GB drive! In any case, now you can worry more about your head than your hard drive.Hopefully day two will bring plenty more interesting and exciting things for me to drool over. If so, and provided I don’t electrocute myself with my slobber, I’ll be back tomorrow with some more fun ideas for spending your tax refund from NAB 2008!”
