Product reviews, tips and more for photographers and Youtube producers
Hedge for Mac/Windows, the fast offloading app, has been updated – or rather, upgraded – to version 18.1. Hedge now offers Fast Lane on Windows machines as well, but far more interesting fro anyone using Macs instead, is the ability of Hedge to offload anything to anything. It’s what the company calls a car wash concept.
Bombich Software recently released an upgrade to its backup and disk cloning application, Carbon Copy Cloner. Carbon Copy Cloner 5 offers complex task filtering, coaching tips, smarter pruning, task grouping and scheduling and more. It still allows you to create exact — bootable — clones of a startup disk and enables you to check if a backup or clone hasn’t been corrupted due to bit rot or other errors. And while I was at it, I had a short talk with Mike Bombich, the developer and publisher of Carbon Copy Cloner, on backing up, offloading and securing your backups.
Micron Technology, Lexar's parent company, announced that it is discontinuing its Lexar retail removable media storage business. The Lexar portfolio includes memory cards, USB flash drives, readers, and storage drives for retail and OEM customers. Micron is exploring opportunities to sell all or part of the Lexar business. The company said it will continue to …
Continue reading "Lexar media discontinued: what’s with your guarantee?"
Atomos’ latest Ninja and Shogun monitor/recorders are pretty awesome, but if there’s one thing the company should work on it’s the way you have to remove your master caddies from the recorder. I can relate to the need for the caddy to sit really tight when recording, but they should be made in such a way that you don’t have to press so hard you risk damaging the top surface when trying to pry them from the unit.
MacBook Pro 2016 users need a dock to hook up their legacy Thunderbolt gear. The most efficient and probably cheapest way to get there is to buy a dock like the CalDigit TS3 Lite or TS3. Those docks have their merit with iMacs too, despite of the need to work with adapters.
Hedge Connect is the iOS companion app to Hedge. It allows you to receive live notifications about the state of your offloads when working on set. Hedge Connect works with both the free and premium version of Hedge for Mac.
Kyno is a tool you can use on a laptop in the field, screening video files while they’re still on recording media. It allows you to create subclips and Excel shot or clip lists, convert clips into editing or delivery formats and send clips to Final Cut Pro X and Premiere Pro.
The industry standard for offloading video clips and photographs is without a doubt ShotPut Pro. This application is now in its sixth generation and has received a complete overhaul. ShotPut Pro 6 has a more intuitive interface, a better workflow, and puts you more in the driver’s seat than any previous version.
Not all lower-cost SSDs are slow and unreliable. I managed to get hold of the newest Crucial MX300 525GB SSD and ran it through a full week of speed and endurance tests. It performed very well even as it costs about half of a comparable SanDisk Extreme Pro.
When do you need an external monitor/recorder? I analysed the NLE support for different formats, the difference between various subsampling methods and between 8-bit and 10-bit colour depth, and compared the internal recordings of different cameras with the footage shot with the newest Shogun Flame. My verdict is that it is always better to shoot to a production codec. It saves a lot of post-production time when you edit with Final Cut Pro X or Da Vinci Resolve. The new Atomos Shogun (and Ninja) Flame support all the ProRes and DNxHD output types, are HDR-capable and come with a number of extras not found anywhere else.
