Carabelli Multimedia

Carabelli Multimedia founded in 1984 with the advent of non linear video editing and the first commercially available medical grade digital camera made by Kodak.   Since then , the quest for the best and most up to date hardware has been my  passion and vice. 

Photography armamentarium

With the advent of full size sensors ala the Nikon D3 and the Nikon D700,  it seems a no brainer to me to  stick with Nikon as opposed to convert to Canon.  Just watching the last golf tournament on TV, I was amazed to see more if not the majority of the press using Nikon’s.  Canons are still great for their long, supremely great lens.  But then, most Canon pros are talking about lens for outdoor sports.   Looking back over my application for lens,  I shoot the low light events.  Indoor Weddings, the evening Hatch on the Henry’s Fork of the Snake, the basketball game at Leland High School.   Nothing beats a full size sensor for High ISO, noiseless shots.  Thus Nikon I will stay..

My Favorite Software for photography: Lightroom 2, Photoshop (member of National Association of Professional Photoshop Users-NAPP),  Bibble,  Nikon Control Center,  Imaginate.  FLickr Pro Life Member(Meng Syn DDS is my screen name),   QImage (Really cool for printing!), Photomatix (HDR Software), and  PTGui Pro(panoramic HDR shots),  and an old piece of software called Photomontage by Arcsoft (for those pics made up of little thumbnails)

Video Filming and Editing Stuff

Its an HD world we live in now and just as I was getting confident that I could do anything with  standard definition video,  along comes a completely new compression, and work flow for HD.  My first non-linear PC card was the Miro-10 on NT, back when blank CD media was $50 dollars a disk!   By the advent of HD a few years ago, I was editing with Adobe Premier on a Quad Core PC with a dedicated JVC DV deck (BR-DV600UA).  I use shoot a Sony VX2000, a Sony TRV900, a CanonZR, and a Sony PC10 in a waterproof case.  For HD, I bought the first Canon HDV10 in San Jose and a Sony HDR-FX1000.  After fiddling around with the expensive Cineform Plugins and Premier,  to develop a work flow that would preserve the HD quality of the cameras,  I switched over to editing with a Mac PRO eight core and Final Cut Pro Studio 3 which in my opinion is the best way to work with HD streams specifically because of the great quality of the ProRes422 codec.   I use both After Effects on the PC and Motion on the Mac and share short authored clips on a networked NAS so that I can access them from both systems.  Editing Facility:  MAC Pro 8 core with 8 gigs of Memory and 3 terabytes of raided storage local running Final Cut PRO, Motion, Fotomagico (I love this), After Effects, Premier and Photoshop.  Recently added a Blackmagic Intensity Pro to output realtime to a HDMI monitor–a 1080P 22 inch VIZIO from Costco.  On the PC side,   a Quad Core Duo with 4 Gigs of memory  running XP and Premier CS4, Ultra, Visual Communicator, Scenalyzer, Canopus Procoder 3, Imaginate, and Photoshop, After Effects and Illustrator CS3.   Dual 24″ monitors on a dual screen STARVIEW Dual DVI|USB KVM switch and a Vimeo 20 inch 108op monitor.   I also use a Lenova Core 2  and a Mac Pro laptop in the field.   I like using Adobe On Location on the PC Laptop.  To show our videos,  we have Studio self powered DJ Speakers, a portable 130 inch wide aspect screen with a 2000 lumen HD projector for on the road

The latest acquisition is a Xacti HD100   and an Xacti HD800 camera.  These  camera shoots a flavor of HD AVCHD called qPixel.  This particular type of H.264 seems to very compatible with Final Cut Pro natively or with small modifications using MPEG Streamclip.  The XACTI shoots to an SD card in 720p 60 frames and 1080i 30 frames and is spectacular.  These files will play on a PS3 (in 1080i)  right from the SD card.   I could go on and on about the benefits of a Portable HD camera over say the Canon A1 that is on my list of “to buy” but I will leave that to the blog.  Is that a HD camera in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

I started to use TMPGenc as my new standard to clip and transcode Xacti HD AVCHD.   Works well and I can do some quick and dirty editing tothe new DIVX HD standard.  NOw the best and most consistant way for me to dump video from all cameras is to capture with the Blackmagic Utilities directly from HDMI into DVPRO HD.

 

Check out some of the cool stuff that this camera can do. 

TO Edit this stuff on a MAC.  I generally shoot  as high res as I can and edit in Final Cut Pro using the black magic card to capture.   I  like the HQ ProRes 422.   There were issues with the 1080i setting and green screens with quicktime but the latest upgrade of quicktime  is said to fix this as of Quicktime 7.5.5.  Also using CoreAVC Codec on the PC will allow you to playback 1080i  on you PC.   Here is a YouTube video showing the process of preparing QPixel h.264 for use in Final Cut Pro