Coming soon

April 17, 2005

Apple announced Final Cut Studio this morning at an event at the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. The promo session by Apple is a lead-off event to this week's National Association of Broadcasters convention in Sin City.

Among the outstanding presentations was the real-time use of iChat AV by the folks over at Scrubs to show how they can review video remotely and collaboratively edit with remote locations. The whole world of live remotes for local TV and other real-time production work.

Included in Apple's announcement were lots of cool features but none that top Final Cut Pro 5's emergence as a multi-camera editing platform. Not only does the new revision of Final Cut do multi-camera but it does so in an incredibly slick way. Watch your feeds in a 4x4 to 16x16 viewer window and select from amongst as many high definition feeds as you would like. Read more about Coming soon

New bankruptcy law

April 16, 2005

After several years of trying the credit card industry has the new bankruptcy law they've been after. Tomorrow morning on CBS's Sunday Morning there will be a segment on the new law and community education classes on bankruptcy at the William S. Boyd School of Law at UNLV.

I'll have to depend on TIVO to capture it as I'll be gleaning the latest from a high tech company at the NAB Convetntion. G5 Powerbooks anyone? I wish. Surely there will be some great HD TV features of Tiger demoed.

Half-time controversy

February 11, 2005

This year's Super Bowl half-time show is causing complaints for the FCC. By Monday the FCC had received four complaints about the half-time show amongst 33 comments overall. Last year's Janet Jackson half-time show generated only three complaints compared to the four about this year's show. According to MediaWeek people complained about the reference to California grass in McCartneys' song, suggesting it is a reference to marijuana and two others felt the show was boring or unimpressive.

We the people

February 10, 2005

It is not too uncommon to see the West Wing television show have some important points about governance and the process of governing. With the help of Lawrence Lessig last evening's show made a very important point about constitutional democracries. It is the culture not the document that matters. There is a critical lesson here for Iraq. One country, group of people, military, etc., no matter how well-meaning can choose the form of government for another people. Perhaps the most important phrase in the United States Constitution is "We the People," not you the former subjects of an evil dictator, not you the people of China, but We the People.

Super Bowl

February 7, 2005

As has been noted elsewhere, yesterday's Super Bowl had by far the best halftime show. There is some irony that a year ago CBS was exposed to one of the worst ever FOX, which is much more likely in general to have some questionable programming, has the best ever.

On the other hand, perhaps scared away by the titillating half time show last year the advertisers were anemic at best. Ford's Mustang Convertable and FedEx's Ten things required in ads weren't bad, not great either, CareerBuilder.com's ad(s) might have been better if it was one instead of a repetitious series that was old by the second version of the ad. And what is it with the Olympus creative team, I mean photo-copy team, whose ads are amongst the most blatant wanna-be-rip-off ads. Great way to launch a new product.

A new low

February 3, 2005

The first season of The Apprentice was pretty good. The second not so bad. The third is rapidly becoming a bad melodrama. Now comes word that in addition to casting for The Apprentice 4 and The Apprentice 5, NBC executives are looking for people apply for The Apprentice: Martha Stewart.

What's next The Apprentice Dennis Kozlowski or should we just have The Apprentice Enron Eddition? Does the fact that a business leader doing time in prison for crimes that involve violating the public trust not bother any of the executives at NBC? Maybe somebody should be looking into the finances there, or even at General Electric? If they openly promote dishonesty and encourage financial shenanigans perhaps we should be taking a second look at the financials.

Television