Splice Now

Using the GPU

Posted February 11, 2010 by Steve
Categories: Adobe Premiere, Workflow

As some of you may know, Adobe has been working on a new player engine for Premiere that aims at full utilization of all your CPU cores and tight integration with your graphics card. Shown at IBC last year, information about the technology, code-named “Mercury,” seems limited to a few breathless blog posts and a recently-posted video. But the demo, available here (Sneak Peek: Adobe Mercury Playback Engine) is very impressive. They’re able to show multi-stream native editing of 4K Red footage — with just a high-end Nvidia card on a 64-bit PC. Yes, you read that right — 4K on a stock PC. According to this post, the technology will initially be limited to Nvidia’s “Cuda” architecture.

When Mercury might appear in a product you could buy isn’t clear (Adobe CS5 is slated for delivery in April). What is clear is that the price of high-end video performance is being driven relentlessly downward by the video game market, which in turn is driving the capabilities of modern GPUs (the chip in your graphics card).

A lot of editors are just getting used to the idea of working in HD. That may seem pretty tame a lot sooner than you think.

Comments: 1 Comment

Why Hospital Visits Cost So Much

Posted February 10, 2010 by Steve
Categories: Editors Guild, Labor, Uncategorized

Two articles on opposite sides of the NY Times’ business page yesterday neatly frame the crisis in medical costs. In the first, we learn that HCA, the largest hospital corporation in America, was taken private in 2006. The investors in the deal put up $5 billion and borrowed about $28 billion more. It’s not clear what added value that move brought to patients, but now, instead of paying back all that money, the new owners are paying themselves a fat multi-billion dollar dividend. Who pays for that? Patients, that’s who, in the form of higher prices. (Details are here: Shareholders Deciding a Dividend.)

On the other side of the page we learn that hospitals now spend $35 billion a year on patients who don’t have insurance. Who pays for that? The patients who do. That’s probably one reason why hospital bills are designed to be incomprehensible, with obscene prices like a $75 charge for a 35 cent disposable scalpel (true story). (Details are here: Bills Stalled, Hospitals Fear Rising Unpaid Care.)

I assume that people reading this blog fall into one of three groups: members of a union (whose medical costs go up every year and threaten to detonate every new contract), people who buy their own health insurance (at exorbitant prices because they’re not part of a risk pool) and people who get along without insurance (and end up using the emergency room the rest of us pay for). Is this system working for any of us?

Comments: 1 Comment

Addicted to Novelty

Posted February 9, 2010 by Steve
Categories: Media and Society

For those of you who might have missed it, last week PBS’ Frontline aired a really interesting look at how the wired world is affecting us. I was skeptical — shows like this are usually full of platitudes or stuff that’s so obvious there’s no point in talking about it — but this one was different. It starts with internet addiction and the fact that a lot of teachers think that the multi-tasking students of today can’t concentrate, and it ends with a very sobering look at videogame-powered warfare. It’s a serious, thoughtful look at where we’re heading and it’s enlivened by a documentary style that doesn’t try to exclude the filmmakers from the film itself.

You can see the whole thing at decent full-screen quality here: Digital Nation. The web site also offers longer interviews and other video materials that didn’t make it into the air version.

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The Clip Info Window

Posted January 26, 2010 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Technical Tips

Here’s a feature that’s been around forever, but many people don’t seem to be aware of it. Say you want to find a piece of data logged for a particular clip. You open the appropriate bin, but the column containing the info you’re interested in isn’t displayed. You could open the bin’s Fast Menu, select Headings and display the appropriate column. But there’s a quicker way. Just Command-Option-click on the clip’s icon (in any view, including frame view). A window will open showing you all the data logged for that clip.

Better yet, you can do the same thing for clips in the source or record monitors. In this case, click and hold in the space between the source and record monitor position bars. Do it on the left side of that area and your window reveals data for the clip in the source monitor. Do it on the right side and you’ll see data for the clip in the record monitor.

Comments: 3 Comments

The Mouseless Interface

Posted January 25, 2010 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Media and Society, User Interface

Some of you would probably kill for the user interface that Tom Cruise employs in “Minority Report,” with big images displayed on transparent screens and a gestural language that interprets your body movements. My sense is that an editor could get pretty tired working that way all day, but the giant canvas and the shear flexibility and organic quality of it are very compelling, to say the least.

Until now, interfaces like that required the user to wear motion capture gloves that are seen by cameras installed in the ceiling. But Microsoft is working on an add-on for XBox 360 that uses a single camera under the monitor. I was pretty skeptical about what this could do, but an article in this month’s Scientific American made me think again. The system, called Project Natal, is remarkably sophisticated, watching your body in three dimensions at 30 fps, and matching the movements of your skeletal joints to a database of biometric data they’ve developed.

Of course, we’re not playing video games in our editing rooms. And the demos Microsoft has come up with aren’t exactly my idea of an editing interface. But games mean sales volume and volume drives down costs. I could easily imagine a more focused incarnation of this technology based on the motion of your hands working in a more confined space — say the area above your keyboard. That might get pretty interesting as a way to interact with a machine.

Sony says that its similar “Motion Control” technology will be the primary interface for the upcoming Playstation 3. And other companies are working on the idea, too, including Canesta, Hitachi, GestureTek and Oblong Industries (they were technology advisors on “Minority Report”).

Video games have been a big driver in pushing down the price of graphics processors, which in turn has helped empower our editing applications. With competition between Sony and Microsoft heating up development, this technology might work the same way. The mouse has served us well for a long time now, much longer than its developers at the Stanford Research Institute probably imagined, but it can’t be the best we can do.

Comments: 1 Comment

Sleeping or Surfing

Posted January 22, 2010 by Steve
Categories: Media and Society

With Apple’s rumored tablet computer supposedly coming out next Wednesday, the release this week of a survey on young Americans’ digital proclivities couldn’t have been more timely. The short version of the results, compiled by the Kaiser foundation, show that the average kid age 8 to 18 spends their time like this:

Watching TV: 4.5 hours
Playing Music: 2.5 hours
Using a Computer: 1.5 hours
Playing Video Games: 1.25 hours
Reading: 38 min
Watching movies: 25 min
Texting: 1.5 hours
Cell phone: 30 min

If your thinking that this adds up to more time than a lot of people are awake, you’re right — these activities are happening simultaneously.

Anybody who thinks this isn’t changing the way we think and behave might ponder the fact that the heaviest users had mostly C grades or lower and were more likely to be bored or sad or get into trouble. Another clear takeaway: TV and especially movies, are losing out to other forms of digital entertainment.

The details are here: If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online

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