On October 16th from 7pm to 9pm at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD Chesapeake Systems, Butler Film, AJA and Apple will be hosting an event entitled The Red Camera - from Lens to Screen and Everything In-Between. This event will feature what has become the most talked-about digital cinema/video camera in recent years, the Red One by Red Digital Cinema. David Butler has been using this camera for a while now, as his company was one of the first in the region to acquire the Red One.

This month I had the pleasure of talking to Jeff Seibert of Increo Solutions, the developers of the very useful and well-executed web-based workgroup collaboration tool/service Backboard. Jeff used to intern at Chesapeake Systems, before he went off to Stanford, and has continued to be part of the Chesapeake Systems extended family. It seemed a good time to share his current endeavors with our clientele, many of whom have a clear-cut use for Backboard. Read on for the interview, and don’t hesitate to check out Backboard itself at www.getbackboard.com — You can begin using it for free, immediately!

This month’s edition of The Primer will stay on the topic of laptop/portable storage, but this time moving outside the machine itself and examining external storage options of several types that are suitable for laptop use. These kinds of external storage devices, when directly connected to the system, are referred to as “Direct-Attached Storage”, or DAS devices. For anyone doing serious work on a laptop, especially when dealing with high-bandwidth digital media such as digitized audio and video, a DAS device of one kind or another is essentially a necessity due to size and speed issues of the drive your media lives on. Some external storage devices are better than others at such tasks, and there is always the issue of how well-protected the device is from breakdown and data loss. Read on to learn about the primary options available in this space.