In a few threads late last week, I alluded to a new Mac application/plugin would be announced and we would be showing it on our JumpStart on HDV Production DVD.

Well, I got word this morning there will in factbe a new product, but the company has chosen to market it for almost $5,000.00.

I don't think it is in any Mac person's best interest to pay almost twice the price of the camera for a converter, so we will not be showing the plugin on the DVD.

As far as I know, at this moment, the most economical package available for the Mac is from Steve Mullen. We will do our best to create a workflow for it on the DVD package that provides success.

Our DVD is still on track. I look forward to releasing it at the end of the month as promised. Sorry for the mis information.

Regards to all

$5000 US Dollars?

<<<-- Originally posted by Frank Granovski : $5000 US Dollars? -->>>


Yep, $5,000.00 US$

the original pricing I had been provided suggested prices under $200.00 for the whole package, which I was very excited about.

At $5K, you can afford to buy a top of the light PC package, and Aspect HD.

A disapointment for sure.

Well I doubt if they're going to sell many at that price.
By the way, as I outlined months ago on this forum, doing an offline edit of HDV footage in FCP doesn't require ANY plugins or packages, just a shareware demuxer that is available freely on the internet, lots of time for the convertions, and lots of hard drive space for the uncompressed footage. It's a laborious process, but it works just fine.
What DOES require a plugin is getting the edited material back to MPEG2 at HD resolution on the Mac, which Steve seems to have very kindly programmed for us and sells as part of his package.
I'm still holding out for Pixlet, but if I had any serious editing to do in this format I would definately consider his package.


Cheers

Paul

<<<-- Originally posted by Paul Mogg : Well I doubt if they're going to sell many at that price.

I'm still holding out for Pixlet, but if I had any serious editing to do in this format I would definately consider his package.
-->>>

They won't sell any at that price. I suspect the price is set at that rate because they couldn't get it to work, and rather than tell me that, they have priced it out of the range of the majority of clients.

Pixlet is not going to be available for capture. If you visit Apple's site, they announced it would be available for use as a player for movies, not a capture format for editing.

I've heard other people say that, but what I've also heard in talking to people that should know is that it will be a fully editable HD codec, not just a playback format. So you should be able to take your HDV footage and convert it to Pixlet for real time HD editing on the Mac, then convert back to whatever delivery format you have in mind. I hope this will be the case.

To quote from the Apple website:


" Pixlet is the first studio-grade codec for filmmakers. Pixlet provides 20-25:1 compression, allowing a 75MB/sec series of frames to be delivered in a 3MB/sec movie, similar to DV data rates. Or a series of frames that are over 6GB in size can be contained within a 250MB movie. Pixlet lets high-end digital film frames play in real time with any Panther Mac, without investing in costly, proprietary playback hardware. "