There is a lot of tracking going on in this issue. First, Charlie White is over the moon about the improved 3D tracking inside the new Autodesk Flame 2009. If your budget can’t quite cover one of these aptly called "Hero Box" systems, there’s plenty of tracking advice to glean from Sasa Jokic about the powerful but much less expensive Imagineer mocha and Adobe After Effects. Sasa’s greenscreen compositing tutorial on 16 includes a link to his full video tutorial, which features an additional tip not included in the written version. Further on, Boris FX’s Peter McAuley shows you how to track and style a realistic lens flare inside Boris Continuum Complete. What makes BCC Lens Flare unique, he says, is its ability to track a camera pan in the source footage and thereby create a more natural flare animation to match the original in-camera effect.

Between deadlines and bundling against this bitterly cold Northeast winter, we actually managed to make it out of the office quite a bit in these past few weeks. Specifically, we’ve been meeting with manufacturers and getting a good look at what they will be bringing with them to NAB. The news is good: They are listening to their users like never before, bringing you more resolution, lower price points and more format flexibility.

JVC’s new GY-HM700 ProHD Camcorder, for example, is a shoulder-mount camera that records native QuickTime files to inexpensive SDHC flash memory cards (a 16 GB card, the last time we checked, was selling for about $30). It also features an optional attachment for recording SxS media to the XDCAM-EX format. Yes, you read that correctly: JVC partnered with Sony in order to offer this practical option, something that could not have occurred while Matsushita (now renamed Panasonic) was a controlling owner of the company. The second camera coming from JVC, the HM100, is a tiny yet powerful pro handheld that also records native QT files for Final Cut Pro. You can imagine the reaction from the crowd at the Final Cut Pro User Group SuperMeet at Macworld in January, where the HM100 premiered. The camera also made the rounds at our table during lunch with JVC’s J. Lee Thompson and Lon Mass in February.

Since both of these camcorders record QuickTime.mov files natively, there’s no need to transcode. You can even edit — as long as that doesn’t make you break out in a cold sweat — right off the memory card itself. Clearly JVC is thinking of its users first and proprietary formats second.

For more details, as well as some exciting news about what Panasonic and others will be bringing to the show next month, see Gear Up. We’ll continue our news of upcoming NAB releases online and via e-mail, as well as highlight later-breaking announcements in the April issue.

We’ve already mapped out for the coming year a great lineup of new Webinars, too. Check out the range of topics — from Blu-ray authoring to viral video, from greenscreen compositing to going green — in the StudioDaily Store (www.studiodaily.com/store/webinars). Reserve your spot now and check back often to see what other timely topics we add as we get out there in the field and uncover them.

— Beth Marchant, Editor-in-Chief

bmarchant@accessintel.com