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Canon XL1S MiniDV Digital Camcorder by Canon Video Average Customer Review:  Electronics (08 August, 2001) list price: $4,999.99 US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Editorial Review Small enough to carry around and costing not much more than a top-of-the-line consumer camcorder, the XL1S produces such high-quality results that it is sure to be the top choice for many independent filmmakers who demand full features and controls. Like its predecessor, the XL1, this camera uses three separate 270,000 pixel CCDs (one for each primary color) for the best picture quality. The XL1S records digital audio, with two channels of 16 bit/48 KHz sound or four channels of 12 bit/32 KHz sound. The body is based on a magnesium-alloy frame for maximum durability. It ships with a 16x optical zoom lens with optical image stabilization, but is also compatible with other XL camcorder lenses. With an optional adapter, you can use Canon EF (EOS) still-camera lenses--some of which also feature optical image stabilization. The electronics of the XL1S have many advanced features, including a number of programmed AE modes, as well as both shutter and aperture priority modes. There are two different auto modes, one of which allows you to adjust any setting manually, if you want, and the other, which adjusts every setting automatically and lets you adjust nothing. A spotlight mode automatically compensates for difficulties when shooting a subject bathed in a spotlight. The computer-shooting mode gets rid of monitor flicker that happens when shooting a computer screen. There are also three different shooting modes: normal movie, digital photo, and frame movie. Normal movie mode is for any time you want to shoot video footage. Digital-photo mode records a still image for six seconds on the MiniDV tape and also captures any accompanying audio for a commentary track. The frame movie mode records 30 noninterlaced still images per second, instead of capturing 60 fps interlaced images. This mode isn't intended to be used for shooting video (playback may not look completely smooth). Rather, frame movie mode should be used as a burst, or continuous, shooting mode, like you'd find on a still camera. The XL1S offers many new and updated features over the XL1. There is a 16:9 shooting mode where electronic lines draw are displayed through the viewfinder so you can compose your shots flexibly for later conversion to HDTV, where 16:9 is the standard. SMPTE color bars help establish a proper color reference for shooting and editing. Interval recording lets you shoot time-elapsed motion video with intervals from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. Zebra patterns help you determine overexposed areas in your shot so you can adjust the aperture and shutter accordingly.
Digital Video Format and IEEE 1394 The XL1S is a consummate professional creation tool that supports the established industry standards, MiniDV and IEEE 1394. Support of these standards make the XL1S a flexible video creation tool that interoperates with standard DV equipment and computer editing systems as accorded by engineering, scientific and broadcast communities.
DV Format Technology and Its Advantages
IEEE 1394 (DV Terminal) The XL1S comes standard with a DV terminal that conforms to IEEE 1394 for digital transfer of video and sound, in addition to regular video and audio outputs. The IEEE 1394 (also known as FireWire®) standard allows editing, copying and recording of digital video over a single cable. This transfer format affords improved image and sound quality and is virtually free from generation loss.
The 3 CCD System
The three CCD image sensors in the XL1S, each with 270,000 pixels, were specifically designed to capture as much image detail as possible and for shooting under extremely low light conditions. The size of each pixel is 72 square microns - 150% larger than the pixel-size on comparable DV models. The result is an approximate 4 dB improvement in sensitivity. This improved sensitivity means that each CCD can capture more information at all light ranges. In super low light, the XL1S still captures crisp and clear digital data. Under extremely bright conditions, the Pixel Shift capabilities of the XL1S greatly reduces vertical white streaks and smears, making it a consummate field recording device for all conditions. Because human eyes see green more clearly and readily, the green component of a video signal contains 60% of the picture detail whereas the red and blue components together comprise the remaining 40%. With the advanced Pixel Shift on the XL1S, the green CCD is physically shifted the equivalent distance of 1/2 pixel horizontally from the red and blue CCD, and the green signal is electronically shifted 1/2 pixel vertically. This shifting of the green CCD increases the sampling points, resulting in a system that is comparable to 410,000 pixel CCD systems in terms of resolution. With a larger pixel size and the process of Pixel Shift, the Canon XL1S gives wider dynamic range, better low light recording, reduced vertical smears, and high quality still images without sacrificing the highest resolution DV available. Audio and Video Inputs and Outputs The XL1S offers a plethora of means by which to get audio and video in and out of the camcorder. The XL1S is designed to handle two types of analog video input and output: using audio/video cables (composite) or S-video. There are four audio inputs and outputs. All connections are on the camera body.What's in the Box
Features Reviews (19)
Asin: B00005NKXS |
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Premiere 6.0 Mac by Adobe Average Customer Review:  CD-ROM (03 February, 2001) US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Editorial Review A powerful tool for professional, digital video editing, Adobe Premiere 6.0 for Macintosh comfortably closes the DV-to-Web gap. With new support for DV and cross-platform support for all of the leading Web video formats, Premiere aggressively integrates a variety of features and functions. If you've worked with other Adobe applications, Premiere will look familiar, with the command menus at the top of the screen, windows to perform your assembling and editing, the toolbox, and the floating palettes. The Premiere toolbox contains tools for selecting, editing, and viewing your clips. The floating palettes contain additional features that help you monitor, modify, and enhance your work. You can hide and rearrange the palettes to organize your workspace, as needed. All of the clips that you import into your project--video, still image, sequence, and audio--are listed in the Project window. Every project has only one Project window; if you close this window, you close the project. The Project window is customizable, so that you can sort and view your clips by using the options that are more appropriate for your editing style. Use the Monitor window to view individual clips, set In and Out points, set markers, add and remove clips from the Timeline, trim clips, and preview the Timeline. When you use the Single-Track Editing workspace, the Monitor window, by default, includes the Source view and the Program view. When you use the A/B Editing workspace, the Monitor window, by default, displays only the Program view and uses individual Clip windows, instead of the Source view. The Source view displays a single clip as it appears on your hard disk. Use the Source view to prepare a clip for inclusion in the Timeline. The Program view displays the current state of the Timeline--when you preview the Timeline, it plays in the Program view. ... Read more Features Reviews (1)
Asin: B000056NSS |
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Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Upgrade by Adobe Average Customer Review: CD-ROM (20 April, 2002) list price: $149.00 US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Editorial Review Mixed-media professionals such as photographers, Web designers, andgraphic designers will not be disappointed in Adobe's latest incarnation ofPhotoshop. In this release, Adobe aims hard at addressing the issues of filemanagement, easy photo retouching, and smarter output for the Web. While Adobemanages to successfully address these issues, it also remains true to its photoediting roots. New and improved features and tools such as a painting option andan enhanced brush palette allow Photoshop to build on its reputation as theleading tool for image manipulators. New-school designers of wirelessapplications will smile when they discover that Photoshop 7.0 offers support forWBMP-formatted graphics. Photoshop 7.0's new file management system comes in the form of a WindowsExplorer-like file browser that allows users to easily sort and locate theirimages within various projects. Users can now organize projects by name, date,resolution, and a number of additional parameters. The enhanced brush palette allows users to create custom brushes and save themas presets that can be accessed from the Tools options bar. Users can easilyvary different aspects of the brush by changing the hue, opacity, or flow of thebrushes for pastels, oils, and charcoal. Photoshop 7.0 also introduces a newHealing Brush and Patch Tool. With these tools, users can easily "heal" theirimages by removing scratches, blemishes, and other imperfections whilepreserving shading, lighting, and texture attributes. Adobe has taken great strides in revamping Photoshop 7.0 to be more Web-readythan ever before. With the help of its companion software Image Ready, users cannow easily create rollovers and complex navigation bars by using the newRollovers palette. Additional Web-ready features include enhanced Web exportfunctions that allow designers to preview images designed for PDAs and mobilephones in the WBMP format. Users can easily create a slide show of their imagesand post online using the new Web Gallery. People concerned about posting theirimages online can secure their images with the new password protection featurebefore sharing them. Adobe has finally introduced a long overdue spell checker with wickedmultilingual spell-checking capabilities. A new search and replace featureallows users to search and replace across different layers in the same document. While Photoshop 7.0 introduces an impressive array of features that allowphotographers, Web designers, and graphic designers to work more effectivelywith Web and wireless devices, it also remains the leading tool for anyoneserious about digital imaging. No other software package provides users with theability to create such high-quality images. --Rich Ting ... Read more Reviews (20)
As an upgrade, I give 7.0 four stars. Why? There's just not that much more for that extra star. I was expecting a jump in features like the one between versions 5.5 and 6.0. Pretty much, they give you a new tool for repairing photos (this is great and worth it if you're interested in digital photography, of course: but for a web designer, it's useless), a few upgrades, and a prettier interface. As a web designer, I didn't find a whole lot more that's useful, so for the fellow web designers out there, it might not be worth it at all. But for the digital photographer with the extra money, grab it. That brush will probably be very useful to you. As a new program, without a previous installation of Photoshop, FIVE STARS. GET IT NOW. I can't stress this enough. Photoshop will be worth it if you're looking to do this professionally; it is THE graphic design program out there right now. If you're just a home user that wants to fix up a photo or two, I don't think it's worth the $600+ just for that.
Another nice addition is the file browser. See all your pictures at a glance, rotate them, classify them, rate them, etc. You can also view all the metadata (data added by your digital camera), such as date taken, exposure, color profile, and others. Adobe also reworked (OK... fixed) Contact Sheet, Web Gallery, and Picture Package. Those actually work now, and they'll do exactly what you want them to. I agree it should have been done right in the first place, but I'm just too happy they are usable now. Photoshop 7.0 also lets you save your workspace. You can now place all your tabs and windows just the way you like them, and save the positions. I have 3 or 4 different workspaces I toggle through, depending on what I'm working on. This is a huge time saver. Once again, this could have been done before, but I'm glad it finally found its way to Photoshop. Conclusion: the healing tool itself is worth the price. Think of the rest as a bonus. :) ... Read more Asin: B000063EMX |
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Adobe InDesign 2.0 by Adobe Average Customer Review: CD-ROM -- our price: $774.99 (price subject to change: see help) US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Editorial Review Adobe InDesign 2.0 is simply the best professional print design andlayout package available. Version 2.0 outweighs former market leader QuarkXPressand should dominate the future of desktop publishing with significantperformance improvements, seamless integration with other Adobe products, and abevy of sophisticated new visual effects and cross-media integration. Previousversions of InDesign were processor-intensive and sluggish. InDesign 2.0 runssignificantly faster and smoother, even on older systems like Pentium I and IIPCs. For Mac users, it is OS X native. Graphic designers will love InDesign's robust feature set, which includesadvanced type tools that allow for multiple font-control options at both thecharacter and paragraph level. InDesign 2.0 also incorporates many of the mostuseful Photoshop visual effects, including editable drop shadows, lightingeffects, feathering, and transparency that can be applied to any object--text,graphics, or images. These effects can also be imported with native Photoshopand Illustrator file placement. In addition, InDesign's unlimited multiple undoand redo options offer a major improvement over QuarkXPress. InDesign 2.0 not only supports tables and multipage table formatting (Quark 5.0cannot format multipage tables), it can also convert and retain the originalformatting of any tab-delimited table data from word processing, database, orspreadsheet documents such as Microsoft Word and Excel. InDesign 2.0 allows forseamless Acrobat PDF file import and placement, as well as the ability to importboth PageMaker and QuarkXPress documents (3.3 or later). As with previous versions, InDesign 2.0 does not support documents created withQuarkXTensions. InDesign also does not allow for export to Quark or PageMakerformats or backward-compatibility file export, as did older InDesign fileversions. However, users can export InDesign 2.0 files in multiple mediaformats, including EPS, SVG, RTF, HTML, and XML. You can also embed Metadata(XMP) into InDesign layouts for automated workflows. InDesign 2.0's Web publishing options are a significant step up over previousversions but are still fairly primitive; InDesign is emphatically not a Webeditor but instead offers limited Web publishing support. The HTML exportautomatically converts most text to images (rather than exact-positioning CSSlayers as one might expect), producing very large files with frequently poorimage quality and few image optimization options. There's also no support forbrowser preview, rollovers, or image maps, which QuarkXPress 5.0 provides.InDesign offers fairly simple and easy-to-use, well-formed XML support (no DTDs)that can both import and export XML tags; the XML in rival QuarkXPress is moreadvanced but less product-integrated and is DTD-based. With its focus on visual effects, design production, and prepress and printingneeds, plus the added bonus of multichannel publishing support (print, Web,etc.), InDesign 2.0 is clearly intended for professional print and graphicdesigners. For easier-to-learn and more basic office and small-business documentpublishing, Adobe PageMaker or even a Microsoft publishing product is moreappropriate. Conversely, for large technical publications or larger corporationswith true cross-media publishing and content-management needs, Adobe FrameMakeris a better option, with more advanced native support for content markuplanguages and multiple export formats. Though InDesign 2.0 offers many compelling new features, there remains room forimprovement, particularly for HTML export, WYSIWYG type menus, and more targeteduser tools. However, these are small complaints. InDesign 2.0 should be theproduct of choice for today's design professional. --Rich Ting ... Read more Reviews (5)
Creating baseline grids (to keep your columns of text aligned) is incredibly easy. A Glyph palette for browsing and inserting any glyph in a font, and a shortcut menu for quickly inserting special characters. Character Styles to augment Paragraph styles. OpenType Fonts can contain up to 65,000 characters and you can tell InDesign to automatically substitute swash characters, ligatures, ordinals, fractions, etc., as you type. You don't have to do all the work of using a different face for ligatures and swash characters, saving tons of time. Multiple undo/redo and automatic recovery of documents after a system or power failure. Transparency Easily apply drop shadows, feathering, and other opacity settings within InDesign. No more going back to a source file's application for that. Soft edges are maintained when placing transparent Photoshop files! Also maintain transparency in imported Illustrator files, as well as Acrobat 5.0 PDF files. Tables are easy to create in InDesign. And you can, import styled Microsoft© Word and Excel tables directly, or turn tab-delimited text files into tables in one step. Quickly reformat the look and feel of tables: Set row height and column width, apply color fills to alternating rows, merge cells, insert graphics, and specify high-end typographical settings. Importing PDF files is simple.You can choose exactly how it comes in and re-size the PDF for paste up in the document. InDesign no longer requires the AdobePS driver, so it fits into a wider variety of print work flows, and it offers a consistent cross-platform experience. New printing features include the ability to save high-quality, driver-independent PostScript© files directly from the print dialog box; the ability to print master pages, Preflighting/packaging controls-I was able to identify problems with linked graphics, fonts, and colors in my InDesign documents using built-in preflighting controls. Then I can use it to package all required files, including the necessary fonts, for hand-off to print production. Paragraph Composer and Optical Kerning let me fine tune the look of words, paragraphs and columns for high quality typography.. What do I miss in InDesign? I wish there was a Story Editor that allowed me to view an entire story at once, even if it was threaded across several pages. That's really valuable when I need to cut or rearrange an article for fit. I would like a palette to adjust the size of a font or its leading or the weight of a stroke up or down in tenth of a point increments by clicking on something or using my up and down arrows. InDesign's character palette's little arrows adjust by a full point only. To adjust by fractions of a point, I have to change to the text tool, click in the boxes and type the exact number. Final Verdict? InDesign is a Superior Product for Designers. It saves you from jumping around in other programs to perform tasks, and its typography controls have no match.
The main problem I have with inDesign is that it's painfully slow on my G3 Pismo PowerBook. I used Quark as both a word processor and for page layout, but inDesign cannot be used as a word processor on my system. Paragraphs of any length become difficult to edit as the computer lag to update the formatting is absolutely unacceptable. I've come to writing my text in TextEdit and then cutting and pasting the final result. However, if I find typos in proof-reading, it's actually faster to edit the TextEdit version and then, once again, cut and paste it back in to inDesign. That's terrible. I'm also not a fan of the way inDesign does not automatically create new pages with text frames if your text flows over. In Quark it's automatic, based on the Master pages, but in inDesign, there's some manual clicking that needs to take place. It's awkward and counter-intuitive. If you're going to lay out a magazine on OSX, this is really the only way to go. My wish is inDesign 3 will have my issues resolved, but even if they are, that doesn't help my current frustrations. If not, they're leaving a tiny space open for Quark to get back in to the race. ... Read more Asin: B00005T7C8 |
$774.99 |
All the other reviews were old...
InDesign 2.0 - FINALLY a page layout program with features!
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Dreamweaver 4.0 by Macromedia Average Customer Review:  CD-ROM (23 December, 2000) list price: $299.99 US | Canada | United Kingdom | Germany | France Editorial Review Some folks pour Web code from their soul using nothing more than asimple text editor. Others avoid code altogether by building pages in a WYSIWYGeditor's visual interface. Whatever one's preferences, Macromedia's Dreamweaver4 delivers a powerful collection of features for building and maintaining eventhe most complex sites. Since its initial launch, Dreamweaver has charmed Web developers with aneasy-to-use yet versatile editing environment. Boasting an impressive collection ofresources for both hand coders and visual layout designers, complex code iscleanly served up via a powerful visual layout editor or a text editor thatinspects source code. In-depth features that create forms, Flash files, frames,cascading style sheets, Java, and ActiveX files are perfectly integrated intothe application. For professional Web development crews, a multiuserenvironment efficiently manages the fast-paced flow of page content updates. Addan ever-growing Web community offering hundreds of extensions that automate andsimplify the development process, and it's easy to see why Dreamweaver is afavorite Web-authoring tool. Dreamweaver 4 offers a fresh set of features, upgrades, and improvements.Already a great visual editor, Dreamweaver 4 pumps up its hand-codingcapabilities with a new Code View feature--a text editor with such customizablefeatures as live syntax coloring, tag balancing, and auto indenting. In SplitView, the Code and Design views display simultaneously, providing the best ofboth worlds for novice and pro coders alike. A Code Reference feature provides athorough guide to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Graphic designers will enjoyDreamweaver 4's seamless integration with other Macromedia products, such asFireworks and Flash. One now can create editable vector graphics--Flash buttonsand text--directly in Dreamweaver, a feature we found particularly useful. Current users might want to consider taking a close look at Macromedia'sDreamweaver 4 Web site to ensure that the collection of new features warrantsan upgrade this time around. New users, especially Web-building novices, mayfind the initial learning curve a bit steep, though frequent visits to the helpfiles are well worth the enormous power this program yields. --EricTwelker ... Read more Reviews (73)
I used Dreamweaver MX 2004 for a month, uninstalled it and went back to Dreamweaver 4. It really is that terrible and the work space is terribly cluttered making it very hard to work within. Bottom Line -- Get Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 instead if you can find it. Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 is a very good web design package that knocks Dreamweaver MX 2004 for ten. You will simply hate Dreamweaver MX 2004 when you install it on your system. I nearly barfed after a month of using that *new* completely hostile and non-user friendly piece of unstable and slow excuse for a web design software program. Get this instead ... if you can find it...
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