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Motorola TX500 Bluetooth…

The Motorola TX500 Bluetooth In-Car Speakerphone is extremely easy to pair with a smart phone and has…

Bose SoundLink II Mobile…

The Bose SoundLink II mobile Bluetooth speaker sounds very good, is extremely easy to use and feels…

The KitchenAid 5-Speed…

At 3 am in the morning during an all night edit session nothing hits the spot like a good smoothie. The…

Sanyo eneloop Rechargeable AA…

Sanyo eneloop AA rechargeable batteries are good a place to start when investing in rechargeable batteries.…

HitFilm 2 Ultimate Review

HitFilm 2 Ultimate is an easy to use effects and compositing tool that offers outstanding value under $400.…

iPad mini Versus Kindle Fire…

The Kindle Fire HD is an appealing product and a great choice if you consider it a media consumption device…

The Roku 2 XS Review

The Roku 2 XS is a great gift for anyone with a high speed Internet connection that wants to get into…

funkyfresh computers and accessories

iGrand Piano for iPad Review

Computers and Accessories
Tuesday, 27 November 2012 16:51
The iGrand Piano is a $20 app and great stocking stuffer from IK Multimedia that consists of roughly 200MB of piano samples resulting in a very playable instrument across multiple octaves. Creating a good quality piano sample requires capturing the full range of the piano at multiple velocities. IK Multimedia provides several pianos to choose from in a variety of timbres that are all impressive, especially for a $20 app. We plugged our iPad directly into our Mackie mixer and DAW to capture this raw recording. We wanted to hear what the piano sounded like pumping through the JBLs. The pianos are panned left to right and include some reverb to make the sound a little more lush. This recording is straight from the iPad. As you listen you can hear us toggle through the various pianos and octaves. We tested it using the iRig Keys portable MIDI keyboard controller connected to an iPad 2. The iRig Keys provides 37 velocity sensitive mini keys and requires no technical knowledge. Just plug it in and it works. This could be very handy for kids to practice with headphones when noise is an issue or if a real piano or full size MIDI controller is not available. The iRig Keys is cheaply made. The keys and buttons are spongy, certainly not what we would expect in a $100 unit. A better option would be the M-Audio Axiom AIR Mini 32 or something similar with an adapter to connect to an iOS device. The iGrand Piano is a great gift for the musicians in your life, especially kids. The samples are very good and there's a variety of pianos to keep things interesting. Plus there's more to the app than just playing piano. Lots more. It's well worth the 20 bucks. The iRig Keys MIDI controller, not so much. Visit IK Multimedia to find out more about the iGrand Piano app.

Western Digital VelociRaptor 1TB Review

Computers and Accessories

Wednesday, 31 October 2012 04:33

Western Digital’s VelociRaptor has been one of our preferred SATA drives for video editing for many years. This time around Western Digital improved the performance and raised the capacity to 1TB while maintaining low noise levels for a 10,000 RPM drive. We swapped out a 7200RPM HDD in our workstation with the 1TB VelociRaptor model #WD1000CHTZ and could not discern any change in overall noise levels coming from our system.

The increased capacity of the VelociRaptor will be welcomed by video editing professionals everywhere. We commonly edit multiple tracks of HD video in P2 format, MPEG4, Avid DNxHD and QuickTime ProRes. These projects balloon in size quickly even when using aggressive HD codecs so it’s critical to have enough capacity and overhead on a drive to confidently work on a few projects. RAID arrays are required for more extreme bit rates but we were happy with the performance of the 1TB VelociRaptor when editing DNxHD and ProRes timelines.

A few years ago we had a 300GB 3.5 inch form factor VelociRaptor fail on us and that was very disappointing. We were not even 1 year into using the product. However, since the move to the 2.5 inch form factor wrapped in the 3.5 inch heat sink not one VelociRaptor has failed on us. It’s been a rock solid “online” drive and we’re very happy to see Western Digital continue to make it.

However, we have to wonder if this is the last pure HDD version of the VelociRaptor that will be brought to market. SSDs and hybrid drives are the future and it’s only a matter of time before SSDs replace HDDs, especially at the lower capacities.

For now, the VelociRaptor remains the best price/performance option in a 1TB drive for video editing professionals.

Visit Western Digital for more information.

G-DRIVE 2TB External Drive Review

Computers and Accessories

Monday, 29 October 2012 09:51

The G-DRIVE is a 7200RPM hard drive packaged in an attractive aluminum case / heat sink with USB 3.0 and Firewire 400/800 connectivity. We love most everything about the design except the incredibly cheap power supply. The wall wart doesn’t do this product justice.

We’re currently working on a project with about 500GB worth of files that we needed to transfer to a vendor for additional work. The 2TB G-DRIVE was a good choice for the project. It had enough space to get things started and adding additional files and master edits won’t be an issue. It’s also helpful that the 7200 RPM drive is fast enough to preview with and even work on directly without having to move the entire data set on and off the drive. Plus with USB 3.0 and Firewire connections it drops right in to any PC or Mac NLE. We would like to see eSATA on the back panel too but this will be less of issue as USB 3.0 becomes more common.

The G-DRIVE comes formatted for the Mac OS and that’s fine. We typically run Mac Drive on our PCs to access Mac disks when we need to and many of our vendors still edit on Macs so reformatting the drive wasn’t an issue.

The G-DRIVE features a big white light under the G on the front chassis that we find incredibly annoying. We just don’t need that much blinking light in an edit suite to know the drive is working. The product team should update this with a more subtle ice blue LED. We’d advise testing this in a fairly dark edit suite environment where a little bit of blinking light goes a long way.

We’re glad we finally got our hands on a G-DRIVE. It’s a solid, quiet design with good connectivity. The G-DRIVE worked great with our editing programs and we passed it around to a couple of vendors without any issues. That’s basically what we need and expect from an external hard drive.

Next, we want to see some SSD based solutions with integrated power supplies and Thunderbolt connectivity. It’s about to get crazy with external designs for creative work and we can’t wait.

Visit G-Technology for more information.

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