Apple today announced an update to Final Cut Studio, with more than 100 new features and new versions of Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack Pro, Color and Compressor.

Here’s what’s new:

• Final Cut Studio features Final Cut Pro 7 which expands Apple’s ProRes codec family to support virtually any workflow and includes Easy Export for one step output to a variety of formats and iChat Theater support for real-time collaboration.
• Motion 4 includes enhanced tools such as 3D shadows, reflections and depth of field for stunning motion graphics and visual effects.
• Soundtrack Pro 3 features new multitrack audio tools to streamline audio post production.
• Color 1.5 includes better Final Cut Pro integration and support for full color resolution, and
• Compressor 3.5 adds new features that make it easy to set up and customize your export options.

At $999, the new Final Cut Studio is $300 less than the previous release and is also available as an upgrade for just $299.

Sony has introduced a new portable audio recorder, the PCM-M10 Linear PCM Recorder.

The PCM-M10 is designed to be small and rugged, but offer an extensive range of features, including:

• dedicated transport buttons;
• a five-second pre-record buffer;
• WAV and MP3 format record and play;
• USB port for easy upload/downloads;
• Digital Pitch Control;
• a MicroSD/Memory Stick Micro slot;
• 96 kHz 24-bit recording; and
• 4 GB built-in flash memory.

The PCM-M10 is powered by standard AA batteries.

Zoom has introduced a new video recorder, the Zoom Q3, that promises to be “the best sounding video camcorder you’ve ever heard.”

The Q3 uses the same microphone capsules as Zoom’s popular H4n Handy Recorder. The Q3 has two condenser mics on-board, in an X/Y pattern in order to capture an accurate stereo image

The Q3 looks like it could provide a good set of features for creating Internet videos, but the resolution is limited to 640 x 480.

The Q3 is expected to sell for around $250 and ship in the Fall.

Features:

• Built-in stereo condenser microphones with X/Y configuration for true stereo imaging
• Get up to 1 hour of video with bundled 2GB SD card
• Accepts up to a 32GB SDHC card for 16 hours of recording time
• Large 2.4″ LCD display with a resolution of 320 x 240
• Video resolution of 640 x 480 at 30 frames/sec
• Video Format: MPEG-4 SP
• NTSC / PAL TV output
• Optics Lens Type: Fixed Focus (0.8m to infinity)
• Audio formats with video include 44.1/48kHz 16/24-bit Linear PCM WAV or MP3 up to 320kbps
• Audio only formats include 96kHz 16/24-bit Linear PCM WAV
• Auto Record Level automatically adjusts audio levels during recordings
• Uses two standard AA batteries or NiMH rechargeable batteries
• USB 2.0 with built-in cable
• Windows and Mac OS compatible
• Built-in speaker and tripod mount
• Includes on-board editing software, YouTube uploader software, Apple Quicktime, TV cable, softcase, windscreen, 2GB SD card, two AA Batteries

It looks like YouTube is experimenting with supporting 3D videos.

Click through to YouTube, and the site player offers a dropdown menu of options for viewing the 3D video, including options for old-school Red/Cyan glasses!

YouTube Pete explains:

First off, thanks to you and the other stereoscopy fans in the community for the awesome videos and useful feedback.

I’m the developer working on the stereoscopic player as a 20% project. It’s currently very early, hence the silly bugs like swapping the eyes for the anaglyph modes. A fix for this is in the works.

The current tags are provisional and may change or expand. They are:

yt3d:enable=true Enables the view mode. (obviously you’ve already discovered this)
yt3d:aspect=3:4 Sets the aspect of the encoded video.
yt3d:swap=true Swaps the left and right sources. You may need to add this to videos when the player with fixed anaglyph modes ships. Apologies for the inconvineince.

yt3d:left=0_0.1_0.5_0.9 and yt3d:right=0.5_0.1_1_0.9 These tags are very provisional and most useful for fixing up old videos. They set the source area for each eye as pairs of coordinates x1_y1_x2_y2. The scale of these coordinates is 0,0 for the the top left down to 1,1 for the bottom right.

Ideally you shouldn’t use left and right. For the best quality make the sources as large as possible within the frame and set yt3d:aspect correctly.

There are several options now for creating 3D videos on the cheap, and now it looks like there will be a free way to distribute 3D videos.

via seroundtable

Have you spotted any other 3D videos on YouTube yet? If so, leave a link in the comments.

From the day it was released, people have recognized that the Kindle is crippled by compromises.

Since then:

• We’ve learned that the Kindle is a failure as a new media platform;
• Amazon is turning off Kindle features to keep publishers happy; and that
• “Buying” a book for the Kindle is like Russian roulette.

A lot of people have been willing to ignore these things, though, because the Kindle demonstrated that ebook readers are now workable.

It looks like Amazon may have killed off the Kindle’s buzz as an ebook reader today, though, by remotely deleting hundreds of people’s books:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

It’s bad enough that Amazon is remotely deleting books that people thought they had bought – but the books happen to be the works of George Orwell – 1984 & Animal Farm.

What’s next – Fahrenheit 451?

Federal Communications Commission commissioner Michael Copps has circulated an internal report that blames the decline of traditional journalism on blogging and new media.

“We’re not only losing journalists, we may be losing journalism,” according to Copps.

“Some blame the Internet and bloggers, and that’s certainly a part of the story. All that consolidation and mindless deregulation, rather than reviving the news business, condemned us to less real news, less serious political coverage, less diversity of opinion, less minority and female ownership, less investigative journalism and fewer jobs for journalists.”

The decline of traditional print and broadcast outlets is the primary focus of the report. The report also loks at possible ideas for addressing these “issues”.

“How about journalism?” asked Copps. “Will anyone figure out a business model to support in-depth, investigative journalism – or must we develop something completely new, perhaps based on philanthropy, non-profit models or public media?”

Star Wars Uncut is a fun example of groupsourced moviemaking.

Organizers cut the original movie into 15-second clips. 473 fan moviemakers are recreating the scenes, low-budget style. Once all the clips are done, they will be stitched together to great a new version of the movie, Star Wars Uncut.

Think it will be awful? I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Star Wars Uncut promises to be both intentionally and unintentionally hilarious.

You can follow the projects progress here.

Cato Unbound has published an interesting article by Clay Shirky that looks at the future of journalism.

It looks at the chaos in the world of journalism created by new media, and how maintaining the status quo is impossible:

Like driving, journalism is not a profession — no degree or certification is required to practice it, and training often comes after hiring — and it is increasingly being transformed into an activity, open to all, sometimes done well, sometimes badly, but at a volume that simply cannot be supported by a small group of full-time workers. The journalistic models that will excel in the next few years will rely on new forms of creation, some of which will be done by professionals, some by amateurs, some by crowds, and some by machines.

This will not replace the older forms journalism, but then nothing else will either; both preservation and simple replacement are off the table. The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all.

Shirky takes it as a given that the old models for journalism, especially newspaper journalism, won’t survive as both money and attention move away from old media to blogs, YouTube, Twitter and other new media and social media new sources.

But Shirky points out that we’re not just losing old media publishers, we’re losing a “public” that has a shared perspective on the world because of a shared media experience. In the future, the “public” that shares your perspective on the world is going to be not fixed by geography, but by your interests, the sites that you visit and the way you choose to get your news.

Amazon today announced that more than 2 million users have downloaded Lexcycle Stanza, an electronic book reader application for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch. Stanza users have downloaded over 12 million books.

“These milestones highlight that many people are quite comfortable reading full length books via Stanza on their iPhones and iPod touch. From commercial titles by Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown to public domain titles by F. Scott Fitzgerald and H.G. Wells, we are thrilled to learn that Stanza has been partially responsible for a lot of people reading more in the past year than they have in years prior to that,” said Neelan Choksi, CEO of Lexcycle. “We want to thank Stanza users for their support over the past year.”

In addition to the iPhone / iPod touch version of Stanza, a desktop version is available for Mac and PC, which supports saving files for the Kindle. The Mac version also supports text-to-speech conversion of books into AudioBook.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah-4U4C6wVk

This episode of Traditional Media in Transition features Andrew Michael Baron of Rocketboom, one of the earliest video podcasts.

Rocketboom is a daily international news program, based in New York City, covering a wide range of information and commentary from top news stories to contemporary Internet culture.