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As a certified gadget hound, I know a winner when I see one and the folks at Play Inc. have exactly that in the new Pocket Producer, a handheld device that transforms a basic Palm Pilot PDA into an efficient postproduction tool for accurately logging audio, video, and film timecode. And, of course, your Palm Pilot remains fully functional, allowing you access to hundreds of other applications.
There's no doubt that handheld PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) computing is enjoying a boom. These mini-computers are now faster, have more memory, and are even smaller than ever before. The concept of handheld video production is not new. Both the old Production Magic Shot Logger, on the ill-fated Mac Newton handheld platform, and e-Trim, which was a problematic prototype, tried it. Play purchased the e-Trim technology, improved it, and created Pocket Producer, now shipping at a 3.0 version (due to the software's early history under e-Trim).
Recently I worked with Pocket Producer while returning from a remote location shoot in the Pacific Islands. Play has created a cool, cost-effective, small, mobile logging system. A perfect combination would be a small camera with a foldout LCD viewfinder such as the Sony DCR-- PC100 or Canon GL1. I used a small battery-operated color LCD monitor, the M-329 3.28-inch from Citizen Corp., along with the veteran Sony VX1000 DV camcorder and the Pocket Producer. It all fit on the airline seat-back tabletop. On the flight back from the shoot I wrote the voice-over, trimmed the fat from my footage, and cut together an effective 10 minutes to be used on a local cable TV show this fall. And that's the whole idea, to save time in the costly edit suite by effective preproduction. And what professional editor wouldn't want a producer to walk through the door with a ready-to-go Edit Decision List (EDL) full of pre-selected footage?
Pocket Producer enables videographers to select, log, organize, and review preferred clips-anytime, anywhere. This saves megatime...