Mac1080HD - home of the AVCHD converter for Mac

VoltaicHD has now moved over to ShedWorx.com to join its PC cousin.

ShedWorx.com is home to both the Mac and PC versions of VoltaicHD, as well as another new product that we've got under construction.

Along with the move we've released a new version (1.1.2) which contains language support for Norwegian and Italian.

Voltaic version 1.1.1 is now released!

The main change in this release is the addition of multi-language support. We now support English, French and German.

A special thanks to our translators, who are listed on our Internationalisation page.

If you would like to translate Voltaic into your language, drop us a line and we'll let you know what to do.

We have now released Voltaic 1.1 for general use, a little in front of our own target date.

Voltaic 1.1 is a complete re-write, using very little of the code from Voltaic 1.03. We have implemented most of the OSX user interface guidelines, including:
- a list view of files for processing
- text-based status messages for each file
- drag and drop onto the list view
- a standardised toolbar
- a Preferences window
- some concurrency in the processing to speed up batch conversions
- Internationalization

The things left to do on the user interface include:
- Application Help (we have this on the web site instead)
- Automatic checking/updating when new versions are released

Thankyou to everyone who tested the Beta release. We found a few minor bugs, but no show-stoppers.

Please let us know of any problems you hit, and keep the suggestions for new features coming.

NOTE: We have closed off our open Beta test program while we ready Voltaic 1.1 for full release. Thanks to everyone who gave it a try and sent us feedback.

We have had quite a few requests from users not in the Beta test program to get early access to Voltaic 1.1.

Since Voltaic 1.1 happily co-exists alongside Voltaic 1.03, we have decided to make the Beta available to anyone who wants to give it a try.

Please note that this is a Beta release and there are no support resources (such as a User Guide and Videos) yet. There may also be a bug or two still in there.

If you find a bug, please let us know. If you can't get certain things to work, please hold off contacting us for a few weeks as we get our support resources published.

Voltaic 1.1 has been verified on:
- OSX 10.4 (PowerPC)
- OSX 10.4 (Intel)
- OSX 10.5 (PowerPC)
- OSX 10.5 (Intel)

After a few months of development, the Voltaic development team have finally released the 1.1 Beta to our testers.

As promised, Voltaic 1.1 is a complete rewrite of the original Voltaic in order to give us a solid foundation for future development and improvement. The new release includes:
- A file-based main screen (see below for screenshot)
- A preferences screen (see below for screenshot)
- Internationalization support
- Ability to start/stop batch conversions
- Control over where output files are written
- Ability to split out the 5.1 channel audio into a separate file

Depending on how the Beta testing goes, we will release version 1.1 in 2-4 weeks time.

Here is a screenshot of the main screen.

And here is the preferences screen.

Voltaic is now an officially licensed MPEG4 product, meaning that all users are legally covered for usage of the MPEG4 patent set.

All software products which convert AVC/H.264 (otherwise known as MPEG4 Part 10) video are required to be licensed with the MPEG Licensing Authority. AVC/H.264 is the underlying codec used by AVCHD.

This doesn't make a lot of difference to our product functionality, but it does mean that we are now 'legal'. Any software product that deals with MPEG video standards without being licensed runs the risk of being permanently shut down at short notice.

We have received a huge amount of feedback from our users about how they want Voltaic to continue even though Apple now have AVCHD support as part of iMovie'08.

We have therefore decided to embark on a complete re-write of Voltaic to move to an application design that will support the addition of a large number of new features.

Voltaic 1.1 will sport a new user interface showing the list of files to be converted, and progress indications as to which files have been converted.

Voltaic 1.1 won't provide a lot of new functionality, but paves the way for us to support more output formats and a greater amount of control through preferences.

Finally, we have formally begun the licencing process with the AVHCD Co-producers. If we can get through the AVCHD certification tests, Voltaic 1.1 will be an officially endorsed AVCHD converter!

The good news is that this will be a free upgrade to registered users.

Jeff and I will be posting updates as we go, including screenshots as we finalise the user interface. As always, we will welcome feedback from our user group.

Thanks to one of our users (Rick) we've found out what was causing the trouble with iMovie08's AVCHD importing.

With iMovie08 you cannot have Perian enabled. To disable Perian, just go into System Preferences and disable Perian.

Once this was done, all the importing features of iMovie08 worked perfectly. The previewing and importing are very nice, but do require you to leave your camera plugged in during the import process. This does take quite a while, so we (and many of our users) still think Voltaic has its place.

More good news with iMovie08 - you no longer need Perian in order to do FC-mode converting with Voltaic. If you are a FC Express or Pro user and want to keep using Voltaic, once you have iMovie08 you can remove Perain altogether.

We've got our hands on the new iMovie08 and it looks good.

The scrubbing and new organisation of clips and projects is a great innovation. Some folks may struggle with the lack of a timeline though.

We tried importing from a Sony HDR-SR1 and hit a few snags. Firstly, the preview of the camera clips showed corrupted images and did not allow for a preview. When we converted a single clip, it was unusable in iMovie.

Finally, trying to convert 15 clips off the camera just made iMovie crash.

So for us, we're sticking with Voltaic for conversions while we figure out what's going wrong with iMovie.

Our Voltaic-converted clips worked flawlessly with iMovie. Previewing and manipulation was a breeze, even at Voltaic's full-HD resolution of 1920x1080.

For those of you who do not pay attention to Apple news conferences, Apple just released some new products today. Among the releases was a new iLife suite including iMovie '08. Well, according to the iMovie website, AVCHD is now supported.
iMovie supports standard and high definition video, as well as the most popular formats, including DV, HDV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and even AVCHD.
Unfortunately, there is no more information than that.

Where does this leave Voltaic?
We are continuing to develop Voltaic despite the new support of AVCHD in iMovie '08. Why?