Well CES 2011 is finally over and I am almost back to normal.

There was certainly plenty to see there and the industry feels a little rejuvenated this year with 140,000 people attending the show.

Probably the biggest topic at the show was 3D, which showed up in many guises from capture to display.

Both Panasonic and Sony were showing off their professional rigs for 3D film production – Sony even had the car from The Green Hornet on display to demonstrate their system.

Both companies were also showing off their solutions for consumer 3D, with 3D camcorders on display and Sony showing 3D editing with their Vegas software package.

On the playback side, Sony was showing off a full resolution 3D capable VAIO laptop using active shutter technology.

Corel was also showing off their WinDVD software playing back Blu-ray 3D on an Acer laptop at the Showstoppers event.

Autostereopic displays, or ‘3D without glasses’, was also demonstrated in its infant form, with displays from relative unknowns like iPont through to the big boys like Toshiba and Sony.

Sony perhaps had the most convincing display, with a 4k2k display that probably had the best performance, but in all honesty I found that the experience tended to make me feel a little nauseous.

Sony was also demonstrating a portable Blu-ray 3D player prototype with no glasses needed to see the 3D effect on the little screen.

As for regular Blu-ray players, pretty much all of the future models are 3D capable players and companies like Samsung and LG are taking style to another level with the products on display.

Samsung was showing off their slick new Home Theater in a Box, and the wall mountable BD-D7500 Blu-ray3D player will look great with a nice new wall mounted flat screen display.

Blu-ray drives were not forgotten either, with Plextor demonstrating new 12x external drives with the new USB3 interface and Verbatim showing samples of the new 100 GB triple layer BDXL writable Blu-ray Discs.

This extra high capacity technology will not likely be compatible with older players, though we should be able to take advantage of the extra space for video once the players catch up.

LG was also showing an external Blu-ray drive that is compatible with this extension of the format, claiming writing capability for 100GB and 128GB discs.

This brings up an interesting point.

Blu-ray will probably be the last disc media, though with that said this media will likely be extended in capacity and speed, to handle higher bitrates, multiple streams as with for 3D and higher resolution like 4k2k images.

As we have seen with the roll out of picture in picture, BD Live networking and 3D capability, the Blu-ray format continues to evolve to dangle carrot after carrot to keep us hungry for a new player.

As such the format has a lot of life left in it yet, though as solid state memory gets cheaper, there will likely be a time where it just makes sense to abandon rotating media for good.

Watch for more CES related stories over the next few weeks.

Some may have been wondering why I have not been writing as much in 2010 and part of the reason is that I have been working on a film project.

The film was made in conjunction with the San Francisco based film makers community called Scary Cow (if you live in the Bay Area and are interested in making films you should check out the website or ask me in comments) and was shot on a fairly good consumer AVCHD camera.

I decided that I would author a Blu-ray Disc in addition to the DVD and as it turns out the film was the first (and so far only) Scary Cow movie to screen in HiDef at the Scary Cow Screening.

The disc was authored using one of the few editing packages out there that comes with Blu-ray authoring – though I believe that this aspect is actually handled by the Sonic Solutions authoring package.

While authoring the disc was very simple (just as easy as a DVD) I found that limitations like no lossless audio (not even LPCM) would make this solution firmly one for ‘amateurs’.

If folks are interested I can post more articles in the future covering Blu-ray authoring and burning – please show interest in the comments.

Lastly, if you want to check out the film I made, you can see it at YouTube or embedded below… feel free to link to it, digg it or make it a favourite to help spread the word…!

So today I got to spend some time on the show floor and saw a couple of things I think worth commenting on.

A couple of Taiwanese companies Ritek and Optodisc were showing their writable discs.

Optodisc are fairly new to BD-R and were showcasing a BD-R and BD-RE in the 25GB capacity. There are no plans for mass production currently – they are waiting for the market to grow.

Ritek had a whole range of discs including printable 4x media (hub printable coming soon), 50GB media in both BD-R and BD-RE and a 6x BD-R disc. Expect 8x to hit shortly.

Panasonic was demonstrating their new range of Blu-ray players with VieraCast YouTube technology, though I thought the coolest product was the portable DMP-B15 with a built in screen that is beautiful and sharp – ideal for taking your movies on the road.

The player also won a CNET Best of CES Award.

You can see pictures of these new items now in the Gallery.

I see surprising news over at Engadget HD today.

Apparently Pioneer has been showing off their 400GB Blu-ray disc and are claiming that it is read compatible with current drives.

If this turns out to be the case, it is really starting to look good for higher capacity discs.

It sounds like it will take up to a couple of years before the disc hits the store shelves, even longer for a rewritable version … and it is to be followed by a 1TB version in 2013!

For now I am mostly focused on the 25 and 50 GB discs – which are getting cheaper all the time and hopefully will get to prices where it makes sense to back up you HD home movies on Blu-ray Discs rather than AVCHD formated DVDRs.

Perhaps aiming mostly at the ‘bag of hurt’ Apple market, OWC is introducing a 4x Blu-ray writer with both FireWire 400 and FireWire 800, as well as eSATA and USB 2.0.

The drive works with both Macs and PCs and is manufactured by Panasonic.

There is also an LG ‘read only’ drive available. You can check out the OWC Blu-ray offerings here.

Whether it is to archive your TiVo HD Tivo To Go recordings or footage from your HDV or AVCHD video camera, the price of blank Blu-ray media has been somewhat of a barrier to using the format for mass archiving.

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I see over at TWICE that Imation/TDK has announced their 6x recording speed Blu-ray Discs.

The release plan includes both single and double-layer (BD-R DL) discs with 6x recording speed.

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Reading around recently I have discovered that there is certainly some movement in the writable Blu-ray Disc sector.

Engadget is reporting that NEC is planning silicon to support BD-R recording at 8x speed. The recording speed of BD-R was initially only 2x, so this represents a nice saving in record time. 8x speed should be 36 MBps, which may actually tax some slower hard drives!

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Reading over at Engadget today I see that Pioneer has been busy in the R & D laboratory.

First up there is the 400 GB Blu-ray Disc with 16 layers of 25 GB each – quite a few more than the commercially available dual layer discs.

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TWICE is reporting that LG is releasing a new line of Blu-ray PC drives that record and play Blu-ray media at 6x speed.

The drives feature DVD and CD media compatibility as well as SecureDisc for content protection on written media and Lightscribe.

The GBC-H20L and the GBW-H20L carry suggested retails of $199 and $279, respectively. Both models are 6x BD-R/2x BD-RE read compatible, while the GBW-H20L is even said to be dual layer BD-R 50 capable and features 6x BD-R/2x BD-RE read and write compatibility.

Nice to see the price point of these drives coming down, though the features of these units is essentially the same as the ‘Super Drive‘ (pictured) with the HD DVD capability removed.