Any news on a new version of Media 100 software?

Jason, as a matter of interest what is it that you require that isn't available with the current version?

Michael Slowe

I'd like to see some bug fixes. I still get that hang-up frequently when exiting RED5 back to M100. I get random glitching in title/comp/filter rendering. It will go away if I unrender & render a 2nd or 3rd time. Is OSX 10.7.4 approved?

Featurewise, BorisFX rolls out a lot of new filters for RED/Continuum but not all are available for Media100 users. I'd really find beat reactor useful.

For Media100, clip nesting/grouping would be nice. You can drag a group of clips to the bin & back but they're still individual. I used the nesting/grouping a lot in MovieShop5 on my old MacroSystems DraCo. I could drag an entire timeline into another and use in as an single clip. In Media100, I need to export & import files to achieve the same.

I hadn't really used Media100 audio bus tracks before watching one of Floh's tutorials. They're useful. Something similar for video tracks could be useful too.

Importing movies with the option to ignore an embedded alpha or the choice to import only the video or audio of the movie file.

A view option for tabbed windows for bins, like tabs for pages in a web-browser. It would clean up some of my clutter.

Import from video DVD option. We sometimes get spots from clients on DVD that need tagged or changed. I usually the free MacX DVD ripper but it'd be nice just to have a direct import option for Media100.

Better firewire device control. We have some sony HDV decks that we still use but the device control isn't accurate or robust enough for batch digitizing. It always has difficulty pinpointing the timecode. A fuzzier search might work. Rather than find the EXACT frame, find & accept something that is close enough & before the point you're looking for, acquire the slightly larger clip and just adjust the in/out points once the clip is in the system.

Snapshot/freeze frame. Sometimes I just want to hold a frame for several seconds. I could export the frame and re-import but how about a tool that makes it more automatic. Select the frame, keyboard short-cut the tool, and viola, a new still clip is at your disposal.

There are probably other things I'd like but time to get back to work.

Jaeson

Just hold down the option key when in the program menu and you should be able to select in range in all tracks

Jason W. Tower
Fiddler Films

http://www.fiddlerfilms.com

Good to know. Just tried it and it works. Thanks.

DraCo has very nice image quality and its MovieShop NLE software was ahead of its time.

The basic system is powered by a 50mhz Motorola 68060 processor and RAM topped out at 128MB. You could play 720x486 24bit video with 48.1 stereo audio in real-time. You could have up to 99 layers of audio/video. Once you got into layering though, you needed to render things out.

MovieShop has a multicam feature that allows you to work with up to 6 synced clips. When you would done making you edit selections, it built a new timeline for you.

I liked the ability to nest timelines. I could drag a complicated timeline into the bin and that use that as a single video track in a new timeline.

On the I/O side, the basic DraCo has composite and y/c video and rca stereo audio in/out. You could add on a firewire card and an optical audio card. You can shoot with an HD camera, downconvert to SD via firewire to the DraCo and get really good looking image quality.

Remember the Media100 P6000 boards? It turns out that they used the same Sony DVBK firewire cards as the DraCo. Pinnacle used those cards too. DraCo only supports a/v i/o through firewire though, not device control.

There was an add-on card for serial device control & a jog/shuttle controller.

DraCo uses a SCSI-II bus. With SCSI bridge cards you can use SATA drives. I have a few 120GB drives in mine. I've been meaning to try an SSD at aome point. If you can speed up the drive access, render times will improve. Every little bit helps on a 50mhz system.

If I burn data DVDs in ISO9660 format, I can read them on the DraCo. I've transferred data back & forth between the DraCo and Mac that way.

I do have a 10mbit ethernet card and USB1 card installed too. I've used VNC from the DraCo to control my mac.

I have ImageMasterRT and ImageFX. These are the PhotoShop-like apps for the AmigaOS. DraCo will run AmigaOS 3.9 and ProDad's p.OS. I mostly use ImageFX but I like ImageMaster's morphing better. I also have Imagine3D, Lightwave, and Aladdin 4D.

My DraCo is 16 years old, a dinosaur NLE, but it still works and I'll use it now and again for nostalgic reasons.

I also have a VLabMotion/Toccata setup, DraCo's predecessor. It's a decent NLE for the big box Amigas. The cards are Z-II so the video quality is limited by Z-II bottleneck. Composite & Y/C in/out only, no firewire option for VLM. Also, it can only use 4GB partitions and only the 1st 4GB of a drive. Going beyond that with another partition will overwrite the first one. There's no patch available since MovieShop bypasses the normal AmigaOS for drive access and uses custom format partitions. When I get my A4000 reassembled, I'll try using 4GB CF cards.

Broadcaster Elite was the only NLE for Amiga with component video. There was a prototype add-on for DraCo but it didn't get released. But the DraCo firewire more than makes up for that shortcoming. An you can pick up an old M100 card to harvest its firewire board for the DraCo at a reasonable price, compared to what MacroSystems charged when they sold it.

MovieShop has two editing modes for timelines, basic a/b with an fx/transition track & 1 title track (like the older M100) and an RPN mode (reverse polish notation) that offered unlimited layers. The multiple layers are processed in RPN order. With nesting, you can mix & match timeline types in the same project.

Some timeline editing features are insert/move/replace, auto-length, snap to position. Window tabs are nice. You could add meta-data to the clips in your bin. Save multiple custom window arrangements. It also supports arexx scripting so you could simplify complex functions with custom scripts.

Sample MovieShop5 screen:


For a few projects, I used M100/RED for more complex composites & rendering, transferred the 24bit frames to DraCo via data-DVD.

Unfortunately I haven't heard anything new from them since the email I received on May 28th. Will let you know if I receive any updates!

Jason W. Tower
Fiddler Films

http://www.fiddlerfilms.com