Byline: S. D. Katz

Here's a stunt that sums up desktop video in 2005. Blackmagic Design, the I/O card manufacturer that's setting the bar in price/performance, was looking for ways to put DVCPRO HD and its DeckLink cards (www.decklink.com) through the paces in its test lab. After slamming on the test pipeline by moving video in and out of a Mac with different configurations of hard drives, cables, PCs, and footage, someone hit on the idea of using the smallest, least-likely drive in the room to play back HD footage - an iPOD. Well, it worked, and it worked well. The iPOD belonged to one of the testers, and it was loaded with lots of bad '70s rock with only 9GBs of free space. No problem. The testers filled it up with 9GBs of HD video and checked out the data rate. The iPOD played back HD footage for 24 hours without a single dropped frame.

Spanking-new technology can't do anything about bad rock music or bad video, but it is really good at making and allowing you to listen to what you want. That was the original idea way back in the early '90s when the futurists were predicting cheap high-resolution video and digital studios for the masses. Blackmagic and Apple have turned the futurists into historians, and the iPOD is admissible in court as evidence that the digital future is portable and comes in designer colors. You'll just have to live with the fact that an iPOD can hold Jackass: The Movie and the Bee Gees as easily as it does Wong Kar Wai movies or music from Rilo Kiley.

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