AdobeCS5 and nVidia:  First Impressions Part 2.1

If you have been following my ongoing Adobe CS5/nVidia shakedown cruise (here’s Part 1, and here’s Part 2) you might have read my whiny cry:

Adobe CS5 and nVidia: First Impressions Part 2

Sorry about dropping from sight for the last couple of weeks, but when the day-job calls, it calls with a vengeance.  I also apologize for the lack of photos, but I just didn’t think to do screengrabs at all the right times.  Bad editor!  No doughnut!

As I was saying…

Adobe CS5 and nVidia:  First Impressions

I guess once you break the big rules, you get used to it.  You may remember my mini-series from last January, when I replaced a several-year-old Dell Pentium-D workstation with a fire-breathing HP Z-800 eight-core Xeon box.  At that time, I installed my existing Matrox RT.X2 video accelerator card and an ATI Radeon HD4870 video card, to work in collaboration with Adobe Creative Suite CS4.  The system ran pretty well, but it wasn’t a month later that the news started leaking out about something big on the horizon - something called Mercury and CUDA, to be included in the new version of Adobe Creative Suite - CS5.

April brought my yearly trek to Las Vegas for the NAB Convention, and one of the first places I went to was the Adobe booth.  The demos of of the Mercury engine running with the nVidia CUDA cards were incredibly impressive.  I knew instantly I wanted to torture-test this combo.  A few phone calls by the PVC brass brought to my door (eventually) an nVidia Quadro FX4800 video card and the Adobe CS5 Master Collection. As what seems to be the lone member of PVC that edits on a Windows box, I intend to use this combo for ongoing torture tests for PVC.  But first I had to see if it could even be installed in a calm and controlled manner.

NAB2010:  The Story Of The Number “3” And The Letter “D”

I would have posted this last night, before NAB2010 actually started, but I refuse to pay the extortionate $13/day that hotels here think is their God-given right to collect for the same (or worse) Internet access that is free virtually anywhere else.

In making the rounds of the Panasonic and Sony press conferences on Sunday, I was just dumbfounded to hear the breathless fawning over what is at best nascent 3-D television technology.  In a country (the US) where only about 40% of people have invested in HDTVs so far, the cravenness of manufacturers expecting people to rip it all up and buy new equipment already is breathtaking.  This is not to say that 3D can’t be compelling - in the right hands, and with the right content, the effect is impressive - but let’s not kid ourselves.  It is just an EFFECT, after all.  Have you have seen the recent Samsung 3-D TV ad where a dad cuts a block of water out of an aquarium, takes it home, pushes it into their HDTV and then the family is suddenly awash (ahem) in fully-immersive 3-D fish?  That spot verges on fraud, IMHO.  The 3-D effect is limited to the inside of the monitor’s bezel.  And lets face it, not all that much content out there deserves hi-def treatment, much less 3-D.

Here’s hoping that consumers recognize this latest gimmick as just that - a gimmick - and send the gear manufacturers (and their junkie enabler, the Consumer Electronics Association) the 2x4 to the head they so richly deserve.

So am I too much of a curmudgeon?  What do YOU think?

Intriguing Mac Rumor…

I’m no Mac guy, but I have admired Final Cut Pro from a distance for many years now.  I was always under the impression that ProApps was a main leg of the Mac stool, but as others have pointed out, there’s been no DVD Studio Pro update in a long while.

Now a Twitter post portends an interesting turn:

What does it all mean?  I sure don’t know.  What do you think?

Breaking The First Rule Of Non-Linear Editing, Part Two

Our story so far:  Our intrepid editor and geek just spent about $7000 on a new editing computer.  To try and save money, he bought the HP Z800 without a DVD drive or video card.  When he finally tries to install the BluRay burner…)

“bump.”

Whaaaat?

Breaking The First Rule Of Non-Linear Editing, Part One

When last we spoke, I had announced my intention to break The First Rule Of Editing - to actually upgrade my editor in the middle of several ongoing productions.  My reasons were threefold:

* Against all odds, I had the money;

* My 4-year-old dual-Pentium Dell XPS600, which had been rock-steady, had suddenly become pretty flaky, with USB ports disappearing and reappearing at unpredictable times - and when your keyboard, mouse and ShuttlePro are all USB devices, that can be a bad thing;

* And as a Adobe Creative Suite CS4 user, the demo of the upcoming Abobe Mercury engine in combination with new-technology CUDA video cards and a hot Windows machine is quite impressive.  Check it out.

For the last ten years, I have made something of a specialty out of taking inexpensive, low-to-midrange computers and making DV editors out of them. Back in the days of the Canopus DVRaptor, I could take the puniest machine, add RAM and a hard drive for media, and build a pretty functional editor (by the standards of the early 2000’s) for less than $700.  I built more than 50 editors like this over several years, but times have changed.  The budget this time was going to be a whole different beast.

Avid:  Editor or Database?

I’ll admit it, as I have before:  I’m not an Avid guy.  Of course, that doesn’t stop my employer from being an Avid house.  We are currently installing an Interplay system, which centralizes all our assets, and allows many different people throughout the plant to preview the video, audio, graphics and such.  As a part of the installation process, all of us who have to edit must get an Interplay tutorial.  I sat through mine this morning, and for four hours I was reminded of a statement I have heard again and again:

“Final Cut and Premiere Pro are great editors with crappy databases.  Avid is a crappy editor in front of a GREAT database.”

Interplay drives that message home - with a sledgehammer.

There are at least three (and maybe more - I’m not sure) ways to tiptoe through the Interplay database.  The one that looks the most useful to me is the Interplay window that lives inside the Media Composer editor.  This window seems to hold the promise of wiping away all of the various bins (except the bin with the sequence in it.)  Big step forward, IMHO.  Next is Assist, which is a standalone app that can offer logging on a desktop, which of course requires database access.  And speaking of access, then there is Access (wasn’t Microsoft using that name just a minute ago?), which is the heavy-duty search monster, with Boolean searches that can drill through your pile of video like an Exxon oil rig through the Gulf of Mexico.  Not to mention the several administrator tools, which I will never hold permissions for (and rightfully so.)

And I wonder…three (or more) applications?  Wouldn’t one be enough?

I suppose that an argument can be made for each, but really - how complicated do we have to make our systems?

Of course, I probably wouldn’t mind half as much if I could just graft the Premiere Pro interface onto it.  Is that too much to ask?

Page 4 of 4 pages « First  <  2 3 4