VizWorld.com

Adobe has finally announced and released Adobe CS5.  Pricing is consistent with their usual schedule, and you can go a-la carte or buy one of their many “Suites”.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 and its associated point products are scheduled to ship within 30 days, with availability through Adobe Authorized Resellers, the Adobe Store and Adobe Direct Sales.

* Estimated street price for:

• Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection is expected to be US$2599
• Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium is expected to be US$1899
• Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Standard is expected to be US$1299
• Adobe Creative Suite 5 Web Premium is expected to be US$1799
• Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium is expected to be US$1699

One other feature I hadn’t heard of before is the new “Adobe CS Live” program.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium integrates with new Adobe CS Live*, a set of five online services that accelerate key aspects of the creative workflow and enable designers to focus on creating their best work. CS Live online services are complimentary for a limited time and currently include:

* Adobe BrowserLab, an indispensable tool for testing Web site content across different browsers and operating systems.
* Adobe CS Review, which enables online design reviews directly from within Creative Suite 5 applications.
* Access to Acrobat.com services, such as Adobe ConnectNow Web conferencing, to enhance discussion and information exchange with colleagues and clients around the globe.
* Adobe Story, a collaborative script writing tool that improves production and post-production workflows in CS5 Production Premium.
* SiteCatalyst® NetAverages™ from Omniture, which provides Web usage data that helps reduce the guesswork early in the creative process when designing for Web and mobile.

Gizmodo has the full release, go check it out.

Update: Check out Adobe’s Chart to help you pick a Suite that contains the apps you need, as well as see the individual pricing for each app.

via Adobe Creative Suite 5 Now Available – Adobe creative suite 5 – Gizmodo.

Graphics adobe, cs5, software

ComputerWorld has an interview with Sean Koehl, a technology evangelist with Intel Labs, who predicts that the Internet will look different in 5 to 10 years. He states that much of the Internet will be in 3-D. That is not much of a prediction, in my opinion. I predict that the weather will be different in 5 to 10 days. However, the title is a bit misleading. This leads me to believe that the fault lies more with the writer of the article than with Mr. Koehl himself. For example, at one point he says:

The Internet may never go fully 3-D, but making 3-D environments broadly accessible is probably capable within five years,” noted Koehl. “I think it remains to be seen but there are certain kinds of interactions people will want in two dimensions, like reading text. The things we’ll do in three dimensions may be things that we don’t do at all on the Internet today because it isn’t feasible.

via : Intel guru says 3-D Internet will arrive within five year @ Computerworld

Graphics 3d, intel

FXGuide has another great article about an up-and-coming product from The Foundry, a workflow management tool targeted at RED users called ‘Storm’.

Storm is a workflow tool that is aimed at any facility who wants to go beyond the free tools provided by RED and is designed to be used on set and in most post-production houses. The product is scheduled for an IBC launch but fxguide got to spend time on it with the developers before the NAB opened this week. Since the product is still some way off the Foundry will only be showing it in limited showings, and for a brief period during the RED day, Wednesday at the Tropicana.

Eventually, the product will be applicable to more than just RED users, but that’s the first nut they’ve decided to crack. Leveraging heavily against their Blink and Nuke technology, they’ve brought the product a long way in a very short time.

via fxguide – vfx blog – Exclusive: Foundry Storm Revealed.

Graphics foundry, nab, storm

Another big announcement from NAB, Avid has announced their intent to acquire peripheral controller manufacturer Euphonix.  They plan to add the Euphonix offerings to Avid’s existing ICON solutions, improving interoperability with their EuCon high-speed ethernet protocol.

“This acquisition greatly expands our portfolio to offer customers a complementary set of workflow solutions — from independent producers creating music in their home studios to broadcasters preparing segments for national broadcast,” said Gary Greenfield, chairman and CEO, Avid.

How this will impact future Euphonix products or their tools like Media Composer, remains to be seen.  The transaction is expected to close later this month.

via Avid Announces Agreement to Acquire Euphonix.

Hardware avid, euphonix, nab

Adobe is formally unveiling their CS5 suite this week, and fxguidetv met up with them at NAB for a formal demonstration and some hands-on time.  The results are impressive, but do not replace the masterwork of a trained expert (at least, not on first pass).

In Photoshop CS5 there are many new features but a few really stood out as we have been testing it for the last several weeks. HDR production is improved and has been made simpler. There is an impressive new Content Aware Fill and Repair option and the team at Adobe has implemented a raft of JDI fixes. JDI stands for “Just Do It” – minor improvements, that individually are not major, but collectively add up to an improved user experience and a less stressful working day.

They show some great close-ups of the aftermath of the “content aware fill” features, showing that while they are impressive, they do have their flaws (as shown).

via fxguide – after effects vfx – Photoshop CS5 : New HDR imaging & Content Aware.

Graphics adobe, cs5, software

At NAB, a panel discussion was held to discuss the in-progress 3D standards and had several people from the committee working to build the public standards.  For those of you waiting for an official public standard on 3D, you may be a bit disheartened to hear this comment from Ted Szypulski, senior director, technology, research & standards for ESPN 3D and a member of the SMPTE 10E40 Working Group on the 3D Home Master.

“We are not dealing with standards for delivery to the home, but standards for the master that can be interchanged with other 3D content creators and those who distribute the material meant to go to the home,” he explained. “From our work statement, we will generate specifications for the 3D home master for the carriage of 3D content between mastering facilities and the ingest facility of a distribution system.”

Add in that the 10E40 Working Group contains 132 members over 4 groups focusing separately on Metadata, Image Format, Subtitles, and Overlays.  StudioDaily has a great writeup of the whole panel talk, and is definitely worth a read.

via Studio Daily Blog » NAB Panel Asks: Worldwide 3D Standards?.

Hardware 3d, nab, stereoscopic

Kitware has just announced that ParaView 3.8 is available to the masses, with an impressive collection of new features mostly garnered directly from their last VisWeek2009 Presentation.  In addition to officially bringing integration with the ‘Manta’ CPU ray-tracer (in source-form only, not in the compiled binaries), they’ve added interesting GPU-acceleration features like this:

A couple of GPU-based rendering/visualization techniques have been incorporated along with GPU-based volume rendering support for 3D image volumes, which is accessible through the “Volume Mapper” option on the Display tab. Support for Line Integral Convolution (LIC) is available as a plugin; this support can be used for visualizing vector fields over arbitrary surfaces.

In addition, this version introduces support for NetCDF with CF conventions, and a substantially revised Cosmo plugin that adds in data parallelism.  CAVE rendering has returned (if you didn’t know, it hasn’t been in any of the 3.0 releases), and the ‘Adaptive Processing’ version of ParaView (mentioned in the VisWeek talk) is now available (in source-format only) allowing a new way to work with datasets too large to fit in RAM.

There are many more new features, so go ahead and download it and check it out!

via Kitware – News.

Science cave, kitware, manta, paraview, software

Virtual worlds, particularly worlds like Second Life, are rapidly becoming more popular for enterprises and government agencies as global-meeting places where people can talk and interact without having to deal with the expense and trials of planes and hotels.  An article over at ComputerWorld discusses how several companies have begun to integrate virtual worlds into their regular workflow, focusing heavily on the US Naval Undersea Warfare Center.

Back at NUWC, training has become, literally, larger than life. “I can log into Second Life as an avatar and walk into a USS Virginia [class] submarine attack center, which is the command-and-control space, where the commanding officer positions and executes missions,” explains Aguiar. Using Teleplace on an internal network in the prototype virtual attack center, operators can go in as their avatars and run the actual shipboard systems.

Avatars rising in the enterprise.

Science second life, virtual worlds

Kiplinger.com has an infographic up getting into some of the details of the monstrous US Budget and tries to find out just why is it so hard for us to cut Spending?  A few tidbits :

• 57% of the 2011 budget is direct payments to individuals
• 22% of the budget is for Pensions, 19% of it Social Security
• 23% is Health Care
• 19.6% is Defense
• 7% of the Budget is mere interest on our deficit.

See the full graphic after the break.

A Stubborn U.S. Budget – Kiplinger.
Read more…

Graphics budget, financial, government, infographic

A new infographic from John Kumahara and Jonathan Bonnell gathers up all of the available information about the Apple iPad sales into a fairly large graphic.

The graphic, included below, offers an interesting perspective on iPad data — think factoids like consumer expectations and adoption rates by state — that we may have otherwise overlooked (though updated sales and apps figures were released yesterday).

Here are some points of interest that stand out:

- The average price for an iPhone app is three dollars less than the price for an iPad app.

- 80% of iPad apps come with a price tag.

- There were 26,668 tweets per hour on the iPad at its peak.

See the graphic after the break.  My only real complaint is that the text is a bit difficult to read, a bit narrow in parts.  Other than that, some of the numbers are a bit confusing, such as the “Aided Awareness” section.  What does that mean?  And then the “Researched Online” section, is that how many people researched those devices? Or how many people bought the device based on their online research?

via iPad Data Visualized [INFOGRAPHIC].

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Graphics infographic, ipad, mobile, tablet