VizWorld.com

The “I’m Not Bruce” blog has a short piece up about the headaches people in the video business deal with when talking to “regular people” who don’t understand video.  All too often do I get an email from a user “Can you make it an MOV?” or “Can you make in an AVI so I can embed it in PowerPoint?”.  Asking them about codecs means nothing to them, but he has a great analogy to break it down for everyone.

Not all sandwiches are good, and asking me for “a quicktime” or “an mov” or “an avi” is like asking me for “a sandwich on white bread”. You’ve specified that you want a sandwich (video file), with white bread (container format) but you have yet to tell me what kind of sandwich you want (codec).

Get the rest at his site, definitely worth a read.

via I’m Not Bruce: Clients don’t understand Container Formats.

Graphics codec, format, video

A new version of the already fantastic “BonesPro” skin tool for 3dsmax is out, adding in new skin weight painting features and smoothing functions.  All around faster, it now also has a nice new MAXscript interface, making it perfect for integration into professional customized pipelines.  A short list of some of the new features:

• A new paint tool with smoothing mode allows artists to make quick local weight adjustments
• 3ds Max default conform undo system added to the existing legacy workflow.
• MetaBones now have an optional real-time mode similar to ParaBones.
• BonesPro now works natively with object types and no longer converts them internally. This improves performance with large modifier stacks and interoperability with other modifiers.
• Bone groups can now easily be turned into selection sets through a new option in the Bones rollout.
• Bones with non-orthogonal local coordinate systems can now be used like normal bones without causing distortions.

Full details after the break.

Read more…

Graphics 3dsmax, bonespro, plugin, software

One of the disappointing things about today’s launch of the AMD Radeon 6970 is that it is not as fast, or faster than, the NVIDIA GTX 580. Remember that AMD was the first to launch a DirectX 11 GPU last year, the Radeon 5870. Meanwhile NVIDIA took another six months to bring out anything that was close in speed to the 5870. AMD had a huge lead, which they have now lost. Perhaps they lost the lead because TSMC canceled the 32 nm manufacturing process, which the Radeon 6970 was supposed to use.

Fortunately, all is not lost. AMD is slated to launch Antilles in the first quarter of 2011. What is Antilles? It is simply the AMD Radeon 6990. Rumor has it that this graphics card will have two Cayman chips on board. Essentially this will be CrossFire on a single graphics card. One thing to note, there are purported leaked slides showing the specifications for the Radeon 6990. These slides are known to be faked, so do not fall for them.

Hardware amd, radeon

Remember the movie Minority Report where Tom Cruise, playing Chief John Anderton, interfaces with a computer just using his hands? Well, some researchers at MIT are using the Microsoft Kinect to do the same thing. Pretty cool.

This is a graphical interface inspired by the movie “Minority Report”. It uses the Kinect sensor from Microsoft, and the recently released libfreenect driver for interfacing with the Kinect in linux. The graphical interface and the hand detection software were written at MIT to interface with the open source robotics package ‘ROS’, developed by Willow Garage (willowgarage.com). The hand detection software showcases the abilities of the Point Cloud Library (PCL), a part of ROS that MIT has been helping to optimize. The hand detection software is able to distinguish hands and fingers in a cloud of more than 60,000 points at 30 frames per second, allowing natural, real time interaction.

Code available at:

http://www.ros.org/wiki/kinect

http://www.ros.org/wiki/mit-ros-pkg

Work done by CSAIL’s LIS Group (http://lis.csail.mit.edu/) and Robot Locomotion Group (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/­)

via : Kinect Hand Detection

Hardware kinect, microsoft

Christmas is just over a week away, and RealtimeUK has a cute 60s short for the occasion.

RealtimeUK’s Christmas movie Elf ‘N’ Safety from RealtimeUK on Vimeo.

RealtimeUK’s Christmas movie Elf ‘N’ Safety from RealtimeUK on Vimeo.

Graphics realtimeuk, short

The latest video cards have been launched by AMD. These include the Radeon 6970 and the Radeon 6950. The Radeon 6970 has 1536 unified shaders, 96 texture units, 32 Render Output Units (ROP), and a core clock of 880 MHz. It comes with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit memory bus running at 1.375 GHz. This gives it a memory bandwidth of 176 GB/sec. The pixel fill rate is 28.2 Gigapixels/sec, and the texture fillrate is 70.4 Gigatexels/sec. The 6970 consumes 250 Watts of power at load, and 20 Watts at idle.

The Radeon 6950 has 1408 unified shaders, 88 texture units, 32 Render Output Units (ROP), and a core clock of 800 MHz. It comes with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit memory bus running at 1.25 GHz. The 6950 consumes 200 Watts of power at load, and 20 Watts at idle.

Both graphics cards comes with two DVI ports, two mini-DisplayPorts, and one HDMI 1.4 port. One of the DVI ports is a single link port. That means that you cannot drive two 2560×1600 monitors using the DVI ports. Both have 2.64 Billion transistors and are manufactured on TSMC’s 40 nm process.

What about performance? The Radeon 6970 performs similarly to a NVIDIA GTX 570 or GTX 480. That means it is not the fastest graphics card. That title is still held by the GTX 580. The Radeon 6950 performs slightly better than a NVIDIA GTX 470 and slightly worse than a NVIDIA GTX 570. The 6970 will cost $379, while the 6950 will cost $299.

One interesting feature on the new graphics cards is a new switch near the CrossFire connectors. These graphics cards come with two BIOSes. Should you flash the card with a BIOS and it goes horribly wrong, you can then literally flip this switch, boot off the good BIOS, and recover nicely.

via : AMD’s Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD @ Anandtech

Hardware amd, nvidia, radeon

GE announced the winners of their Ecomagination Challenge and GOOD put up an infographic about it. Car Insurance Blog takes a look at the Car of the Future, while another infographic by GOOd surprises everyone showing what is the easiest way to power a light bulb. From Virtual Edge Summit comes an overview at Virtual Events and Virtual Meetings Conference, and finally IT Grunts‘s takes a look at the status of Online Gaming.

Read more…

Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

Over at SeekingAlpha, they’ve updated their US National Debt visualizations and come up with some new charts like the one above.  While at first it may not seem so bad, look closer at that left axis: It’s logarithmic.

The national debt data used in the charts above is for the United States’ total public debt outstanding, which includes the so-called intragovernmental holdings category, which mostly represents where surplus Social Security tax collections have gone since the early 1980s.

Looking at linear axes make for near right-angle graphs.

via Visualizing the U.S. National Debt: 1791-2010 – Seeking Alpha.

Science debt, federal

For today only, you can use the code BIGSALE2010 to get 40% off anything in the Red Giant store!

Happy holidays! Here at Red Giant, we want to show our appreciation to all our favorite people and dedicated fans. For today only, December 14, every item in the Red Giant store is 40% OFF. This includes individual plug-in sets, already-discounted suites, and our incredible Guru Preset Packs.

Feel free to share this announcement with your friends and co-workers so they can benefit too. Do it quickly! This secret sale will last TODAY ONLY.

That means Trapcode Particular for $239, the whole Trapcode Suite for $540, and MAgic Bullet for $480.  TODAY ONLY!

via Red Giant Software: Save 40% on Everything Today Only!.

Graphics redgiant, sale, software, trapcode

Caustic Graphics, a company I’ve loved since day 1, has just been acquired by Imagination Technologies for the tiny sum of $27M.  Imagination Technologies makes the PowerVR SGX chips used in the newer Apple iOS devices (iPhone, iPad) among other things.  When asked about it:

“Ray tracing is a key additional technology that traditionally has been regarded as the exclusive domain of specialized markets and non real-time applications,” said Hossein Yassaie, chief executive of Imagination. “We intend to change that.

Yassaie said the acquisition for $27 million will allow Imagination to create even more advanced graphics technology in the future. Caustic’s patented hardware and software technology allows for more powerful and less expensive ray tracing.

At first glance, I’m not sure if this is good or bad.  Good for Caustic employees probably, but I had always hoped I’ld see a CausticTwo card in my workstation.  Who knows, maybe I will but it’ll be the PowerCaustic card.

via AppleInsider | Apple partner Imagination acquires ‘cinema quality’ graphics chipmaker.

Hardware caustic, imagination technologies