Intelligent Assistance’s Intellicaster is the first, fully automatic system for recording local TV or Radio and publish it to a podcast feed without human intervention. This turnkey Macintosh-based lets local broadcasters join industry leaders like UK-based media Chrysalis Group, the BBC and US-based NPR who are pushing into podcasting to prevent the loss of their audience to audio and video podcasts.

If commercials are removed for copyright reasons, podcast-only commercials can be substituted or Intellicaster can be integrated with startup klickTab’s payments system so viewers can be charged small sums of money to download and view. Either way, it’s a chance for local television to ad incrementally to their revenue, with no effort.

Intellicaster will also suite any source of live production that wants to podcast the live production: distance education, college stations, churches, school broadcast systems or community station.

Intellicaster records the same program timeslots each day, optionally removes commercials, then encodes, uploads and publishes the podcast feed.

Configurations start at US$4495, including Macintosh. Intellicaster can purchased from Intelligent Assistance, or their dealers worldwide.

If you’re one of the few people who still haven’t got enough of Panasonic’s great new HVX200 P2-based HD camcorder, then it’s your day because Panasonic have released a guidebook to the HVX200.

The link will take you to the download page, then scroll down the page.

Make sure that the English language tab, and look for the "Guide – HVX200 Guidebook" in the center of the group of blue icons. (Icon turns red when moused over.) Click that link to get the download started.

Sixty eight pages long the guide describes the main features and functionality of the camera in more depth than a sales brochure. As you’d expect the guide has a slight bias toward P2/Panasonic but mostly it’s a guide that accurately describes the features of the camera and why each of them is a Good Thing!

Square Box System’s CatDV is a media asset database and professional level logging tool. CatDV will import and catalog just about any kind of media file, and with version 5 just released, can also catalog non-media files like project files, spreadsheets and text documents that support a production.

As well as extensive improvements to existing features, version 5 supports editing sequences inside CatDV, so a producer, for example, can not only pull selects but try a simple rough-cut before sending the clips to the editor.

Version 4 has improved online help, better integration with Final Cut Pro by supporting nested sequences. Users
can import and export Final Cut Pro XML files, permitting exchange of clip logging information and sequences between the CatDV database and Final Cut Pro browser window complete with links to the media files.

CatDV is available for Mac OS X and Windows, in both standalone and networked configurations. CatDV 5.0 Professional Edition costs US$275, with upgrades available from US$99. There is a lower cost "Standard Edition" with limited features.