VizWorld.com

Over on YouTube, the Photoshop team has another sneak peek showing some of the great stuff you’ll see in CS6.  First off they show a great feature I can’t wait for: Background Saving.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been frustrated dealing with large poster-print images (1G+) that take 30-45s to save.  In addition, they show a new GPU-accelerated “Liquify” operation that eliminates lots of the lag and problems experienced in the current version.

Sneak Peek #2 – YouTube.

Graphics adobe, photoshop

Adobe has posted a great new sneak-peek video of what you’ll be able to do with the new Photoshop CS6 and Camera Raw.  Showing off some amazing processing capable on crappy cell-phone photos along with some new UI features like interface color changes.

In this video taken straight from the laptop of our Senior Product Manager, Bryan O’Neil Hughes, get an early look at some of the things the Photoshop team is working on for Camera Raw.

via Sneak Peek #1 – YouTube.

Graphics adobe, photoshop

If you’ve been on the fence about buying Lightroom for quickly editing and touching-up photos, wonder no more as you can go download and try out the new Adobe Lightroom 4 beta for free.  In addition to the usual enhancements and bugfixes, the new version offers DSLR video support for the first time.

One very interesting change to Lightroom 4 is much better support for video. DSLR video is now supported right in the application. You can playback video, trim the in-and-out points, easily export a still frame and—this is the biggie—do some actual color correction on video using some of Lightroom’s tools. It doesn’t look like it’s a full-blown color grading application (Adobe has Speedgrade for that now!) but it looks like a quick way to make a color correction and export that to a new video file or send it to a supported service like Facebook or Flickr.

Just head on over to the Adobe Lightroom site to download it and try it out.  Post your findings in the comments below!

via Studio Daily Blog » Lightroom 4 Beta Is Alive and Ready for You to Download.

Graphics adobe, beta, lightroom, software

Adobe is demonstrating a new research project in the NVidia booth at SIGGRAPH, showing off some realtime raytracing effects for Adobe AfterEffects.  Using the power of Fermi GPU’s, they’re able to add effects like reflections and lighting into motion graphics all in real-time.  The Fermi GPU is so fast and their algorithm so optimized that they can actually scrub through the timeline in realtime.

What made it practical for Adobe to build this, and reach such high performance levels, was the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine. Adobe worked with NVIDIA to leverage OptiX to build their new renderer in just a few months. The job of OptiX is to let the developer concentrate on rendering while it handles all the intricacies of making it go fast on the GPU – and Adobe’s results are proving it’s good at its job.

Check out the live demo below.

via Adobe & NVIDIA Team Up for Ray Traced Compositing.

Graphics adobe, nvidia, siggraph

Adobe and NVidia have some great announcements at NAB this week, the new Creative Suite 5.5 from Adobe with improved support for NVidia’s Fermi GPU’s.  Adding several new cards to their “officially supported list”, and several new bells and whistles to their capabilities in the new Mercury Playback Engine, they’ve got some impressive new reasons to crack open your wallet.

“With Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, Adobe is continuing to lead the industry in non-linear editing workflow innovation —and NVIDIA GPUs deliver even more productivity gains for our users,” said Bill Roberts, director of video and audio product management, Adobe.

 

Added Roberts, “With CS5.5 we are dramatically expanding the range of NVIDIA graphics cards that are supported by the Mercury Playback Engine from 11 to 19 — thereby empowering an even greater number of video professionals to be as creative as their imaginations will let them be, with no constraints on what’s possible. We’re making the dreams of any production professional a reality today.”

 

Featuring six gigabytes of graphics memory, the most in the industry, the NVIDIA Quadro 6000 is a boon to those working with complex video editing projects, such as ultra-high resolution 4K RED raw video streams, and RED decoding using RED Rocket.  For the first time, users can decode and debayer 4K R3D, and play full quality 2K video scaled from 4K footage in real-time with RED Rocket and Quadro solutions.

Built for Adobe Professionals – Adobe Creative Suite 5.

Graphics, Hardware adobe, nvidia

An online seminar from some of Adobe’s biggest names will be held tomorrow (via Adobe Connect of course) giving you all of the details you need to know to setup the biggest and baddest video editing system your wallet will allow.

This session will show you how to configure After Effects, Premiere Pro, your computer, and your projects so that working and rendering take as little time as possible. Topics covered include memory and multiprocessing settings in After Effects, CUDA processing in Adobe Premiere Pro, OpenGL processing in After Effects, background rendering, and dozens of little tips to make things faster.

Presenters:

Al Mooney – product manager for Adobe Premiere Pro

Paul Young – software engineering manager for Adobe Premiere Pro

Chris Prosser – software engineering manager for After Effects

Todd Kopriva – technical support lead for Adobe professional video products

Even if you can’t make it, Adobe promises the video will be available on their Facebook page afterwards.

via John Nack on Adobe : Ask a Pro: Setting up a killer video system.

Graphics, Hardware adobe, howto

Thanks to Tony DeYoung for tipping me off to a new eSeminar on Acrobat X & 3D PDF.  You may remember that back in May, Adobe announced they were outsourcing all of the 3D Capabilities in Acrobat to Tech Soft 3D, but I haven’t heard anything else about it since then.  Sounds like things are going well, and the eSeminar sounds like it will have some good demonstrations as well.

Join Joel Geraci, Technical Evangelist, from Adobe and Craig Trudgeon, Chief Technology Officer for Tetra 4D as they talk about what’s new with Acrobat X and 3D PDF technologies. In this eSeminar, you’ll learn how Acrobat X will save time and help you standardize your product data exchange and design review processes in manufacturing. You’ll also see a demonstration of the new 3D PDF Converter plug-in for Acrobat X Pro from Tetra 4D, with updated support for the most current versions of CAD applications such as CATIA V5R20, PRO/E Wildfire 5.0 and Siemens Parasolid 23.

via Acrobat X and 3D PDF | Adobe Acrobat.

Graphics 3d, acrobat, adobe

Last week at the  Adobe MAX event they announced “Project Molehill”, a collection of 3D Acceleration APIs that take advantage of GPUs for high-speed and high-quality rendering.

Today, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, renders thousands of non z-buffered triangles at approximately 30 Hz. With the new 3D APIs, developers can expect hundreds of thousands of z-buffered triangles to be rendered at HD resolution in full screen at around 60 Hz. Using the new 3D APIs in Flash Player and AIR will make it possible to deliver sophisticated 3D experiences across almost every computer and device connected to the Internet.

While this will open up a new world of flash-based Gaming to the masses, it compete directly against existing WebGL functionality, which Adobe addresses as such:

In terms of design, our approach is very similar to the WebGL design. However, we offer a consistent, browser-agnostic solution that will enable advanced 3D experiences on almost every computer and device connected to the Internet. Additionally, GPU-accelerated 3D in Flash Player will build on all the expressiveness features that exist today in Adobe Flash Player.

They will also be integrated into Adobe’s desktop solution Adobe AIR, possibly opening the route to cross-platform gaming via Adobe AIR (something many companies have tried and failed to pull off).  At the event, they demonstrated a racing game built with an updated version of Alternativa Platform.

While they surely don’t hit the performance of native solutions, massive improvements in processor and GPU speeds may not make that necessary. Who knows, maybe Doom 4 will run in Adobe AIR?

One thing’s for sure, it won’t be on the iPhone.

via Adobe Labs – 3D APIs for Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR.

Graphics 3d, adobe, flash

It’s not really news anymore that Adobe CS5 Premiere makes good use of NVidia CUDA for acceleration, but you may be surprised that it’s good enough to convince a show like Tikibot to switch from Final Cut to Premiere for their work in Salt.

“We’re primarily a PC based shop, with a pipeline designed for budget-minded productions,” said Jackson. “We had been using Final Cut, but when Adobe released CS5 with NVIDIA CUDA GPU acceleration of Premiere Pro we got really interested in moving to Premiere. Faster playback is important for VFX editing as we are constantly updating new versions to the edit and shifting timelines.”

In addition to just accelerating Premiere Pro, it accelerated their inhouse tool ‘Studiopass’ to enable 1080p rendering for reviews.

via Tikibot’s CUDA-Charged Adobe CS5 Premiere Pro Pipeline Boosts “S.

Graphics adobe, nvidia, tikibot, vfx

A pair of whitepapers from Intel showcase that you can still do plenty of graphics and media things without a GPU, and do it quote well.

The first one is more of a whitepaper, where the LA-based “Bandito Brothers” media company talks about using Xeon processors with Adobe Creative Suite 5 to process some of their massive work.  For example, in a recent Mountain Dew spot shot with Canon 5D’s and edited via DPX:

Just how big are they? According to Rosenberg, the files occupy 8 MB per frame. So at 24 fps, 192 MB of hard disk space is required per second of video. A 30-second commercial, not counting outtakes, would be stored in a file about 5.8 GB in size. And feature films are generally a bit longer than 30 seconds. “Let’s just say they take up some major real estate,” said Rosenberg. “In the past, we needed a week to do the work. And now it takes just a couple of days to do conversions or set up files.” Returning to the workflow, Rosenberg describes the process following the editing: “Next we kick out a single file that represents the commercial without any color correction. That file then goes onto our colorcorrection system, the IRIDAS SpeedGrade system, which grades the files. Having the faster processors means more layers, more effects, and more color correction passes can be done in real time. Part of that is a combination of the processor and the graphics cards.”

The second one is more technical, talking about Intel’s MP4/AVC Decoding library.

The MP4 file format (ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003) is a multi-media container format that is commonly used to store digital video and audio streams. This whitepaper describes the process of decoding MP4 files using the Intel Media SDK. The following code examples will build upon the existing DirectShow decode sample filter that ships with the Intel Media SDK. The popular open source application Media Player Classic will be used to load the new filter and manage the playback.

Looks like Intel is trying pretty hard to dispel the many talking points about GPU’s in CS5 and video encoding by showing how well the CPU works.  The results are impressive, and I can’t imagine dealing with data at a rate of 192MB per Second.  Of course, the entire 5.8G could fit in memory on a Quadro6000, but you probably wouldn’t be able to do much with it then.

Science adobe, intel