Nvidia Kicks Graphics Up a (Big) Notch

Go with the (Nvidia) Flow

I don’t expect to write directly very much about hard­ware and other nuts & bolts tech­nol­ogy. After all, I did this for two decades while at mil­lime­ter mag and else­where as the ana­log pro­duc­tion and post worlds waned and dig­i­tal took hold. That’s about enough, and oth­ers cover it so well now that why should I bother?
But I’ll still reserve space to take notice when sig­nif­i­cant changes are afoot. This is one of those times.

At HD World 2009, held at the Jav­its Cen­ter this past week, top Nvidia dis­trib­u­tor PNY held the first U.S. demos of Nvidia’s Quadro Dig­i­tal Video Pipeline since its debut at last month’s IBC 2009 Con­ven­tion in Ams­ter­dam. (Announced ear­lier in the year, this combo prod­uct didn’t ship until August.)

The NQDVP (par­don the impromptu abbre­vi­a­tion) is a game changer for indi­vid­u­als and small pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies strapped for the cash to buy top graph­ics sys­tems. It pushes the trend to har­ness­ing GPUs for graph­ics, whether in pro­duc­tion (vir­tual stu­dios) or heavy-duty com­posit­ing and graphics.

The three cards price together around $5000 to $8000; this depends upon your choice of the Quadro FX 3800, Quadro FX 4800, or the recent Quadro FX 5800, with its league-leading 4GB RAM, to go along with the Quadro SDI Cap­ture card (enables uncom­pressed video to be streamed directly to Quadro SDI-enabled GPU mem­ory) and Quadro SDI Out­put card (pro­vides the inte­grated graphics-to-video out­put, enabling 2D and 3D effects to be com­pos­ited in real-time with 2K, HD, and SD video).

At the IBC, Nvidia and Adobe held a joint demo of a sys­tem fit­ted with the FX 5800 card along with Ele­men­tal Accel­er­a­tor, a video pro­cess­ing plug-in for Adobe Pre­miere Pro CS4 that lever­ages the card’s GPU to speed up video decod­ing, pro­cess­ing, and encod­ing. Atten­dees reported near real-time results for most Pre­miere time­line effects, includ­ing heavy duty Gauss­ian blur oper­a­tions, as well as very speedy MPEG-2 encod­ing for DVD output.

In the PNY booth, Brain­storm Mul­ti­me­dia demo’d its vir­tual stu­dio and 3D broad­cast graph­ics soft­ware run­ning on the setup. Brain­storm, which has sold vir­tual stu­dio sys­tems to NBC and the BBC among oth­ers, said they could now cap­ture four 1080 HD inputs, com­pos­ite and out­put high-quality graph­ics, all in real-time.

Assim­i­late has already announced Rocket Fuel, an $11K bun­dle that includes the Nvidia Quadro FX3800 SDI board, RED’s RED Rocket accel­er­a­tor card, and Assimilates’s Scratch Cine 4K post work­flow for real-time ingest, con­form, deliv­ery, and out­put of RED One 4K dig­i­tal cam­era mate­r­ial. Sup­pos­edly Assim­i­late is also close to releas­ing a real-time color cor­rec­tor for RED footage based around the cards. With a rumored price around $15,000 for the work­sta­tion, you can see what graph­ics card improve­ments can deliver for the whole RED ecosys­tem, as well as other post.

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