Infographics Summary for 2010-10-01
10:30 pm
Cinnafilm makes the Analog Digital for Cinemas
8:37 pm
If you’ve ever seen or worked much in video production, you’ll quickly find yourself overwhelmed at the sheer volume of equipment they carry around. What you would think should be a simple process of translating a video from one physical format to another turns into a lengthy drawn out process of hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of dollars of hardware dedicated to reading formats, scaling, transcoding, and writing back. It’s not uncommon for a studio to take their analog reels and prepare them for digital distribution, and find themselves overwhelmed with the process. Imagine this:
- Digitize the film into the computer
- Clean it up (removing dust, scratches, and various other side-effects of the analog space)
- Pipe it back out onto an Analog line to some unknown device
- Unknown device scales it to the desired format (DVD, BluRay, iPad, iPod, NetFlix, Hulu, etc) which means physically scaling it to the right resolution and possibly retiming it for the proper framerate
- Unknown device pumps it back into the computer
- Computer transcodes it into the proper container format
And tada you’re done! The entire process took 3 analog transfers (From film, to Device, and back from Device), and has to be repeated (probably using a different specialized piece of conversion equipment) for each of the many digital distribution formats in use. Just off the top of my head there’s DVD, BluRay, SD television, HD television, NetFlix, Hulu, and the various digital cinema distribution channels in use.
It really is a nightmare of a system. But a solution is coming, care of a small company presenting at GTC called ‘Cinnafilm‘. They’ve created a pure digital system capable of everything the analog system did, and doing it faster.
Read more…
Google Proposes replacing JPEG with WebP
4:00 pm
Today, Google announced a possible replacement for the worldwide accepted standard for web images. Just like JPEG, Google’s new ‘WebP’ format is a lossy compression standard based on the guts of their WebM video codec (formerly called VP8).
WebP uses predictive coding to encode an image, the same methodology used by the VP8 video codec to compress keyframes in videos. Predictive coding uses the values in neighboring blocks of pixels to predict the values in a block, and then encodes only the difference (residual) between the actual values and the prediction. The residuals typically contain many zero values, which can be compressed much more effectively. The residuals are then transformed, quantized and entropy-coded as usual. WebP also uses variable block sizes.
So why try to change the world? For a 40% filesize reduction, that’s why. Cutting most of the images in the world in half would be a huge win. According to the Pingdom tools, downloading the main page of VizWorld.com is 360k of data, and 300K of it is Images. Cutting that down to 200k would be a nice start, and doing it worldwide would be huge.
However, JPEG has huge support from both software and browsers. And not all is wine and roses in the WebP world: encoding an image into WebP format takes an average of 8 times longer. However, due to it’s similarity to WebM & VP8, hardware designed to accelerate those standards is suitable for WebP as well.
Autodesk Releases Advantage Packs, including iRay
2:00 pm
I just got a press release from Autodesk announcing the immediate availability of their ‘Subscription Advantage Packs’ for their 2011 Digital Entertainment Creation software. If you’re an existing subscription customer, then you can get the new Maya 2011, 3dsMax2011, Softimage 2011, MotionBuilder2011, Mudbox2011, and Smoke2011 (for OSX) right now. Each version comes with a few new bells and whistles, but what most of you are really looking forward to is the new 3dsMax2011 with GPU-accelerated PhysX and iray integration.
Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 software – Integrates leading technology from Allegorithmic, NVIDIA and mental images that helps transform rendering and simulation workflows.
· Up to 75 lightweight, resolution-independent Substance dynamic textures
· GPU-accelerated PhysX rigid-body dynamics
· iray photorealistic renderer, one of the first physically accurate “point-and-shoot” renderers
So either hit the website (Via the links after the break), or just fire up the software yourself and check for updates.
ITT announces IDL 8.0 for data visualization and analysis
1:01 pm
ITT Visual Information Solutions has just announced the newest version of their popular IDL suite, IDL 8.0. The new version boasts several little changes like an improved UI and faster performance, but perhaps the biggest feature is the new dynamic graphics system that allows interactive manipulation of individual elements, saving both time nad effort.
“The goal behind IDL development has always been to provide a powerful, yet easy to use, programming environment that allows users to focus on the work at hand, and not on a complex, time-consuming programming tool to analyze data,” said Beau Legeer, director of product marketing for ITT Visual Information Solutions. “IDL 8.0 is focused on this goal more than ever, and makes it easier and faster for users of any experience level to interpret data, but now in a modern, streamlined environment that delivers powerful new programming and graphics functionality.”
Full release after the break.
Drew Berry wins $500k for Biomedical Visualization
11:00 am
The 2010 MacArthur Fellows have been named and each awarded their half-mil ($500,000 USD), and one recipient amongst the crowd shows the not only the popularity of visualization but the power of it as well. Drew Berry, a biomedical animator specializing in the high-scientific work in cellular and molecular processes, has the honor of winning an award.
Trained as a cell biologist as well as in light and electron microscopy, Berry brings a rigorous scientific approach to each project, immersing himself in the relevant research in structural biology, biochemistry, and genetics to ensure that the most current data are represented. In three- and four-dimensional renderings of such key biological concepts as cell death, tumor growth, and the packaging of DNA, Berry captures the details of molecular shape, scale, behavior, and spatio-temporal dynamics in striking form.
Comcast brings Free 3D On Demand
10:00 am
Comcast seems to have embraced the 3D Fad, and possibly acknowledged the success of the various satellite providers already doing it, and added a suite of 3D entries to their On Demand offerings.
To access the movies, go to the On Demand menu of your cable box and then pick Free Movies. From there, scroll on over to 3D movies and you’ll be greeted with a list of eight different selections. Among these you’ll find three documentaries, one Sigfried and Roy magic special, and three 3D movies.
Yeah, I’ve never heard of em, and frankly don’t care to see ‘Sigfried and Roy’ in 3D. Anyway, it’s a nice start and hopefully they’ll continue to flesh out the offerings, and maybe even start offering some of the big-budget 3D Movies on-demand.
GPU Technology Conference
9:00 am
During Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference last week, Randall took some photos of the conference posters and placed them on VizWorld for you to view. Now Nvidia has taken all the conference posters and made them available on-line as PDFs. I could not find my favorite one on-line, so it is the feature image to the right. Can you imagine? A whole room full of monitors on which to visualize your data. Or it is nothing more than a tour stop. Either way it is cool.
VizWorld.com 
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