The Foundry releases shutter roll plugin

I am constantly following the DSLR situation, because I think we are on the verge of having something that is actually usable (again, not in the professional sense, but it would be good enough for stock footage, getting shots for a reel, or potentially a purely spec commercial).

Ideally what is needed from Nikon is a camera that shoots 720p24 without shutter roll, and with a decent codec (ideally 100mbit/s+, but the best we can probably hope for is a 'high' setting of 25mbit/s, which is still better than HDV).

The Foundry just released a shutter roll plugin for AE today, which will fix the roll issue at the price of a lot of processing power. My guess is that it may also compromise the originally intended framing.

D300S may not have shutter roll

A new video showing the video capabilities of the yet-to-be-relased Nikon D300S was released, and notably absent is the shutter roll that was visible in the D90 and D5000. This seems to be the only footage shot on the D300S to be released so far, and it's basically a commercial funded by Nikon, so it's obviously not going to show off the weaknesses of the camera. There are very few handheld shots in the video, which may be an attempt to mask the shutter roll, but the haldheld shot at 2:52 is something that wouldn't have looked as good on the D90. I doubt the shutter roll has been eliminated, but it may have been reduced significantly.

Color 1.5

A lot of the new features announced for Color 1.5 (http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/) are expanded support (such as 4k compatibility, DPX compatibility, better support of Red and XDCAM files, and new hardware compatibility), which is appreciated, but two of the "features" are actually fixes for some of the gigantic design flaws of v1.0, and promise to make the application a lot easier to work with:


1. "Optimized Rendering" (a.k.a. marketing speak for "a rendering system that doesn't have a major design flaw")

Right now, if you render an project, and then go back and make changes to just a few shots, the software doesn't keep track of which shots now need to be rendered. So, you either have to individually add the changed shots to the render queue as you work, or re-render the entire project. The first option is extremely tedious, and the second option can be extremely time consuming. Finally, is v1.5, they claim to have fixed this issue. You can simply "add all unrendered" to the queue.


2. Seamless FCP integration (a.k.a. "something that should have been part of v1.0")

Color doesn't work well with things like speed changes, multiple layers, or basically anything more complex than a single video track with straight cuts. Apparently this will be completely fixed with 1.5. It looks like this is probably being accomplished by sending Color more information about the sequence in the XML file that is used to communicate between the applications.