Just ask DreamWorks or any number of animation houses how important HP gear is to their work. That doesn’t touch on other companies doing CAD, architectural or car design, gas and oil exploration or anyone that edits or does compositing or special effects. The speculation that this innovative maker of quality PCs, servers and workstations would be sold off to the highest bidder–as some speculated–was unsettling, even in an industry known and celebrated for constant, destructive change.

There’s an interesting analysis of HP’s situation by Forbes magazine staff writer Quentin Hardy. The article makes its conclusions known upfront via its title-“HP: The Case For Incoherence”-with a first sentence that reads “You don’t see this much bad news in one place very often.”

The gist of the article, which details the losses incurred by the recent purchase of Palm, the turmoil in the PC industry (HP and Dell are said to make around a 7-percent profit margin on computers while Apple sails by with an estimated 30-percent margin), and the precarious future of the company’s important printer division all lead Hardy to conclude that “changing this company will cause a lot of turmoil and take a long time.”

As chance had it however, I was meeting with a group of HP upper managers and product specialists on tour in the city to present their 3rd major launch of new PC gear this year. “Our situation is no where near as dire as some make it out to be,” said Jim Christiensen, director of media relations of HP’s personal systems group.

“We have over $40 billion of revenue in the personal systems group, making us a Fortune 60 company” says Christiensen. “While our CEO has announced plans that will bring some significant changes, our group is going stronger than ever. Whatever happens, we’re still a very viable part of a $140 billion company. We’re in this business for our customers, and we won’t be letting them down.”

Indeed, September will see the launch of a range of new, innovative computer products at lower, more competitive price points. While I can’t yet go into detail, let’s just say the technology I saw and the calm, confident manner in which it was presented makes me think that HP’s computer division will be doing well no matter what happens.

HP’s innovation lives on: Here’s a PC Mag article that shows how the valuable WebOS ecosystem obtained from HP’s acquisition of Palm will turn up in PCs and other gear.

As long as we’re on subject of changes to one of the US tech industries star players, you might want to read a disturbing analysis of why the US is loosing out on the creation of the next generation of technology. Steve Denning, in a series of Forbes magazine articles that begins with “Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In the USA,” faults—among other issues—traditional cost accounting, which focuses too much attention on increasing short-term profits by continually cutting costs even while this destroys the underlying strength of a technology company.

This inexorable logic is how whole industries disappear, says Denning. Instead we should correct short term thinking with, for example, approaches like “throughput accounting” that puts the emphasis on how companies can add new value, rather than just cut costs. Investors too need to change their thinking to “realize that short-term financial gains are ephemeral: the companies that will generate real value are those that do what is necessary to continuously innovate.” Apple and Amazon are two companies Denning gives credit to for their mantra of continuous innovation.

American tech companies dropping out of a market after creating innovative technology isn’t anything new, of course. Ampex is a good example. The California-based company perfected the audio tape recorder, invented the studio VTR, a portable videotape recorder, high-fidelity movie theater audio systems, multi-track audio recording and video editing. After all of these successes however, over the years Ampex divested itself of video and audio products for both the pro and consumer markets–”We’re just an engineering company” was their new tune. But they didn’t have that huge revenue engine anymore. Ampex finally made only tape recorders for storage–the Space Shuttle and the military were customers. But that wasn’t enough; it went into Chapter 11 in 2008. The Japanese bought a number of these patents and slowly, methodically built successful, worldwide consumer and professional industries from inventions we cast off.

by Dan Ochiva & Joe Herman

Here’s the second part of our series on what we consider the 10 best products of 2010. You can read part 1 here.

Panasonic AF100

When Canon and Nikon added video to their DSLRs and begat HDSLRs, you could almost hear the shudder that went through the camcorder divisions of Sony and Panasonic. Suddenly, highly portable, relatively inexpensive and easy-to-use cameras could create HD video with the shallow depth of field that was long the hallmark of the high end of professional cameradom.

With its AF100 camcorder, Panasonic turns the tables again, this time using the four-thirds format sensor popularized in new still/video cameras that started delivering in 2008 to take on HDSLRs, which suffer with their own issues, including rolling shutters, moiré patterns, and an awkward-for-shooting-video form factor.

Panasonic’s AF100 is now gaining fans, rapidly. While slightly ungainly to hold, the camcorder offers a good feature set including the ability to use a wide range of interchangeable lenses, XLR mic inputs, uncompressed audio, and external monitoring. Other useful features include a modest though useful slow motion setting (which can be initiated with the touch of an external button), zebras for focusing, and a waveform/vectorscope

With a list price just under $5000 (expect to lay out around $7500 for a more usable setup with added storage, a camera rig, and an added lens) this camera could set the bar for the other single sensor camcorders due to release at NAB in April.

Nvidia Quadro (Fermi Series)

It’s tough in some ways to single out graphics cards for inclusion in any year’s list of best tech, since the blandishments of manufacturers make every new model seem a breakthrough.

But Nvidia has done something considerable with its latest Quadro series. (The previous series uses an “FX” after “Quadro”, which the new series drops.) The Fermi chip integrates three billion transistors, about three times the number of transistors in Nvidia’s most powerful graphics chips now on the market. Tom Halfhill, senior analyst at Microprocessor Report says “Fermi surpasses anything announced by NVIDIA’s leading GPU competitor (AMD).”

The cards offer 2GB or more of the latest speedy GDDR5 memory, the memory bandwidth itself grows by an additional 35 percent and the chip sports up to 512 CUDA processing cores, enabling an average 5x faster graphics performance over the prior FX series. With its considerable parallel processing chops and extensive support for programming languages like C++, the chipset will also be more attractive to HPC (high-performance computing) users. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, for one, is building what it’s calling the world’s fastest supercomputer using the cards.

Besides top performance in 3D and graphics apps, folks in our industries will like the continued integration with the rest of post via Nvidia’s SDI Capture card which enables multi-stream, uncompressed video (up to 12-bit color) to be streamed directly to Quadro SDI-enabled GPU memory. Support for the Quadro SDI output card also delivers integrated graphics-to-video enabling 2D and 3D effects to be composited in real-time with 2K, HD, and SD video.

Maxon Cinema 4D, version 12

Version 12 of Maxon’s Cinema 4D is a great upgrade to this versatile modeling and rendering software. We’ve already reported about its growing importance, especially among motion graphics users. Version 12 has a host of new features and enhancements but we think that the new dynamics system and linear workflow are the most important. Its character animation tools are also top-notch. In the New York Design community, Cinema 4D is a very popular application and version 12 continues the tradition of quality German engineering. Our recent review gives the details on why we like the new version of the app.

Laptops started outselling desktop computers in 2008. Meanwhile, ever more capable chips from Nvidia and AMD allowed ever greater graphics firepower to go mobile.

So it comes as no surprise to hear more and more manufacturers make claims for mobile workstations–buffed up laptops for the most part–matching if not replacing your big iron workstation. You can judge for yourself this Thursday, January 27th when HP presents a webinar lead by Jon Peddie. Peddie’s research firm has a long history sussing out trends in graphics and computing–much of it for the moving image industry–so he’s worth listening to. Nvidia will also have someone on this free webcast, so it might be a good time to get up to date about what that company’s CUDA initiative has come up with.

Of course this will all be HP-centric. If you want to investigate another leader in the field, visit Next Computing’s site. Although this New Hampshire-based company is minuscule when compared to HP, they’ve been turning out potent, widely praised “luggable” workstations and servers aimed at graphics and editing for years. Their offerings are good to compare to HP’s more modest laptop line.

You can find out more info about HP’s webinar here.

A Multi-Part Series by Joe Herman

Part III: The Uber Designer

Dan Ochiva contributed to this report.

Part I gave a short background to CGI on the Mac, partly to give some background behind the popularity of Maxon’s Cinema 4D, (You can read Part 1 here.) Part II noted the popularity of Autodesk Maya among character animators and visual effects artists, while Adobe’s game-changing After Effects 2D compositing program became a standard. (You can read Part II here.)

In Part III, let’s look at some of the causes behind the rise in popularity of Cinema 4D, especially among motion graphics producers in New York.

With its many and growing legion of avid users, it’s not easy to miss that Maxon’s Cinema 4D is a highly capable program that contains high-end features well-suited to motion graphics and broadcast designers. While it prices in a similar range to Autodesk Maya—with discounts and upgrade prices that make it even more affordable–the ease with which you can get up to speed when learning Cinema 4D has been a major factor in making it the designer’s favorite 3D app in Gotham.

Surely, that is an important factor and would be reason enough to attract a large base of loyal and devoted users.

However, that doesn’t explain it all. For example, why has Cinema 4D enjoyed success and adoption by studios in New York in spite of such formidable competition from other top notch products including Autodesk 3ds Max, Lightwave, or Softimage — all highly capable and venerable 3D packages in their own right, each of which has it’s own advanced set of features?

I’m not suggesting that almost every design shop in the city uses Cinema 4D exclusively, or even that it is the most popular 3D software in New York today—I don’t have a survey on that. However, I base my opinions on my experience as a freelance motion graphics designer and compositor in New York City for many years working at a variety of studios and production companies. I’ve come to see the remarkable popularity of this software, a program that was relatively little known in the nineties, which seems to be growing with every release, something many of my friends and colleagues also attest too.

(We’d like to know what you think—you can add comments in the section below).

Making the Case

In the previous sections of this series, we have touched on the following points:

• Digital motion designers for the most part began by working with After Effects on the Macintosh sometime during the 1990s (when it was a Mac-only product).

• After Effects users were content to restrict themselves to 2D design and compositing and leave 3D animation to those who specialized in 3D (and vice versa). Neither camp was that interested in each other’s niche since mastering the different programs came only with intense effort.

• After Effects users who wished to do 3D themselves often turned to Specular’s Infini-D to fulfill their 3D requirements. But without a major company behind it, Infini-D eventually vanished from the marketplace, leaving a gaping hole for 3D on the Macintosh platform.

• That many advanced 3D software programs such as Autodesk’s Maya, 3ds max (formerly 3D Studio MAX), Softimage (now owned by Autodesk), and NewTek’s LightWave proliferated on the Windows platform, while few options for capable 3D animation software existed on the Macintosh. This reality resulted initially in a divide between 2D compositing and design (the Mac’s territory) and 3D animation (overwhelmingly based on Windows PCs).

Note: (In his well-researched article in Ars Technica, Dave Girard points out the reasons 3D lagged on the Mac. For example, he notes that until OS X came out, the Mac’s OS wasn’t stable enough nor did it offer the very necessary ability to multi-task. Read more here.)

• Although After Effects was eventually ported to the PC platform along with other graphics mainstays like Photoshop and Illustrator, by and large those in the design community (especially in New York) continued to use the Macintosh as their computing platform in spite of the fact that there was a wealth of high-end 3D software available on the PC platform.

Mac users enter a New Dimension

As we said goodbye to the 1990s, the boom-time of the passing decade was fading, the dot-com bubble had burst and “nine-eleven” was about to darken the palette of colors that would paint the dawn of the new millennium.

But for anyone concerned about advanced graphics, things were getting interesting. After Effects moved beyond flat layers by introducing a 3D camera, Photoshop added a history palette (key for those of us who change our minds), digital video was getting cheaper and easier to work with, and the Internet was connecting all of us in totally new ways.

After Effects’ 3D camera ushered in new possibilities for compositors . Among designers in New York, many After Effects users once content to stay in their 2D niches began casting their eyes longingly towards the world of 3D and imagined how nice it would be if they wouldn’t have to rely on outside 3D animators for every little piece of 3D animation they needed. Wouldn’t it be great if they could start doing some of it themselves? It would probably end up being a whole lot cheaper as well.

They were already developing a sense of working in 3D space due After Effects’ introduction of 3D compositing in version 5 (around 2001). This included the 3D camera, shadow-casting lights, and other features new to After Effects but common to all 3D programs. Although many of us applauded the new 3D capabilities in After Effects, it would be wrong to think of it as a full-featured 3D application. After Effects lacks the sophistication of fully dedicated 3D software such as the ability to model complex geometry and advanced rendering algorithms such as ray tracing. Many referred to the app as working in 2 ½ D space.

Nevertheless motion graphic artists soon began implementing After Effects’ new 3D capabilities, building complex projects with a marked 3D flavor. As a result of these artists becoming more comfortable and familiar working in a 3D environment, the notion of taking the leap into a full 3D production seemed a lot more fathomable than before.

As they looked around for real 3D software to use, they were faced with a question and a dilemma: Which program was good enough, and would it run on their collection of expensive Macintosh hardware? While some Macintosh users switched to Windows apps to take advantage of the rich offerings in 3D software, many design-type folks accustomed to the Mac’s straight forward ease found changing operating systems too daunting. Right or wrong, and well before the PC versus Mac ads hit the airwaves, many in the Apple community were fiercely loyal to the Macintosh.

Stay tuned for the upcoming final segment of our in-depth look at Maxon’s Cinema 4D and its growing popularity in the New York post community. We’ll also review the latest Version 12 of the software.

A Multi-Part Series by Joe Herman

Part II: Crossings

Dan Ochiva contributed to this report.

In Part One, I gave a short background to CGI on the Mac, in part to help understand what I perceive to be the great popularity of Maxon’s Cinema 4D, an affordable, easy to use 3D program for both the Mac and PC. (You can read Part 1 here.)

Let’s continue our story.

In the late 1990s the once small CGI industry began to quickly change. As Wintel (Windows + Intel) machines continued to get faster and cheaper, Softimage (owned at that point by Microsoft) and Maya were released on the PC. The venerable Silicon Graphics machines–once the coveted and exclusive domain of the high priests of 3D—still held the high-end, but owning a MIPS (SGI’s CPU) based machine only made financial sense for top houses doing Hollywood effects or national commercials.

At around the same time, the 2D world picked up complementary strengths as Adobe After Effects was ported to the PC where it joined its other Mac-born brethren Photoshop and Illustrator, which had migrated over well before that.

These hardware and software developments began a significant change in the industry that, in a few short years, was one more knock against mid-range houses in the City that often offered pricey CGI as part of a postproduction package. Since small, flexible boutique operations could now create 2D and 3D work at a much lower price point, anyone buying CGI services would either choose on price or, if that didn’t matter, turn to the high-end players.

Now that most of Adobe’s software–in particular the ‘Swiss knife’ of After Effects–ran on a PC, competition evened out the market for going with either a PC or Mac. For the first time Mac-based After Effects compositors and 2D designers could consider using a PC to gain access to high-end 3D software.

While I don’t know of anyone who has run a valid poll of what’s the most popular 3D software package, if you look around eventually you’ll bump into Autodesk Maya. Based on three leading imaging apps of the early 1990s, Maya is road-tested by many top artists around the world. Not many software programs can boast of its pedigree while still selling well in Version 12.

Running under Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, Maya (it means ‘illusion’ in Sanskrit) has garnered several Academy awards. It offers a shopping list of capabilities: 3D animation, 3D modeling, simulation, visual effects, rendering, match moving, and compositing.

If a Hollywood movie has effects, 3D animation and 3D modeling, it’s a near certainty that Maya was involved, whether you’re talking about Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Avatar or Shrek. Knowing how to use it makes you a member of an elite club of high-end 3D pros.

With a per seat price of around $3750 (not including maintenance releases or support), Maya does a lot, and asks a lot from the user since it’s one of the most complex software apps you’ll ever use.

So how do we make sense of the rise in popularity of Maxon’s Cinema 4D, especially among the motion graphics community? Several factors are at play not the least of which is the excellent features Cinema 4D offers (of which we will discuss later), but first we’ll discuss another important consideration.

Even though Adobe successfully ported After Effects to the PC (as well as Photoshop and Illustrator), many design firms in New York preferred to remain Mac houses, especially those who started out doing 2D motion graphics, compositing and graphic design. Since Photoshop on the Mac is by far the most popular combination, photographers and commercial design artists have also gone the Cupertino way.

Although it would be wrong to over-emphasize the importance of the Mac platform when trying to understand the success of Cinema 4D, we do consider it to be an important factor in its rise among the design community.

Macs draw loyal customers, or fanatics, as some would have it. Apple, of course, has earned its reputation for innovation and quality over the years. Anyone involved in CGI and the graphic arts knows that, and they respond in kind with similar dedication.

Personally, I enjoy working on both PCs and Macs. Any piece of equipment or software app is just a tool. The success of any creative work is of course dependent solely on the vision of the artist. That’s not to minimize the strong, near religious feelings that can arise among users of competing computer platforms (well, okay, Mac users mostly).

So even though through the 1990s a good, low-cost 3D package never caught on for Mac users, loyalty to the Mac persisted, especially as technologies such as Apple Quicktime and later on Final Cut Pro continued to offer important benefits to the platform.

Mac-based designers, it seemed, were still not all that interested in 3D CGI. But things were about to change.

In Part III of this series, we continue our analysis of the growing popularity of Cinema 4D among motion graphic designers. Read it here.

Part I: The Early Days

For a while now, I’ve noticed a buzz for Maxon’s Cinema 4D in production houses in New York. This versatile 3-D animation program has become thoroughly entrenched in the local production community over the past few years, especially in the worlds of motion graphics and broadcast design.

It’s growing in popularity too. The announcement of the release of Version 12 earlier in the month got me thinking about this well-regarded product and its embrace by so many in New York as well as the larger community of creative professionals across the nation.

When I started in CGI, I used a Macintosh. At that time, the Mac wasn’t a strong platform for 3-D animation. Most of us used its power in compositing with After Effects, or to work in 2D design and photography. Nevertheless, some of us turned to the first popular 3-D program for the Mac: Infini-D by Specular International. If you pushed it, the results were pretty good…for the time.

With few alternatives, Infini-D became popular among the Macintosh crowd, especially those who combined it with After Effects.

But as often happens with small start-up ventures, Specular couldn’t make it on its own and soon merged with MetaCreations. This useful app was then merged into other products, sold to at least two other companies, and then finally disappeared. This left a gaping hole for anyone who wanted to do 3-D on the Mac.

In any case, if you were serious about 3-D, starting in the 1990s high-concept projects inevitably ended up on on Silicon Graphics (SGI) machines running Alias and Softimage 3-D apps. Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, with SGI-gear powering its detailed, realistic dinosaurs, set the standard. On the PC platform you’d most likely use 3D Studio (today it’s Autodesk 3ds Max). At this point, the growing use of 3-D on the other platforms wasn’t much of an issue for Macintosh users; for the most part, they just didn’t do a lot of 3-D.

Instead, most motion graphic designers were compositing with After Effects, which at that time was a Mac-only product. 3-D animators, as well as those doing live action film work, were content to leave the compositing to the Mac side, and thus a natural divide emerged in most studios. Simply put, 3-D animators used SGI machines and PCs–and 2D compositors and graphic designers went for Macs.

Click here to Read Part II in which SGI takes a dive…

If you need to work with lots of high-resolution images—for editing, design, scientific research—you’re in luck. Turns out there’s a number of capable graphics systems that will allow you to pull together a system that’s orders of magnitude cheaper than only a few years ago.

That’s according to Jon Peddie, who heads a company under his own name that tracks these things. I’ve known Jon for years—he’s a regular at Siggraph presentations and on other occasions where it’s useful to have someone who can straddle both graphics and marketing. More info here.

You can sign up on his site to get sent updates on an irregular basis, i.e. when Jon thinks there’s something interesting to talk about. He’s tracked the industry for years, so you know you’re getting some straight stuff.

For many productions, including any number of feature films, Adobe After Effects has long ruled as the motion graphics tool of choice. With the recent release of After Effects CS5 (Creative Suite version 5), the app continues to grow in usefulness, including its new 64-bit roots.

You can learn specific video-centric details about rolling the app into your postproduction suite by taking the July 20th webinar Getting the Most Out of After Effects CS5. More info here.

I think that’s a wise investment (it costs $79) since the folks imparting the information are the husband and wife team of Chris and Trish Meyer. They are true pioneers of employing desktop apps in pro productions, and are probably the best-known AE trainers in the biz. Crish (a mashup of their first names and the name of their design studio) have a number of popular books on AE in their portfolio, as well as regular gigs on the training site Lynda as well as on the ProVideo Coalition site, which is sponsoring the event.

The webinar looks like it will mostly help experienced AE users, since it tackles new features such as the Roto Brush tool (for anyone doing rotoscoping, the ability to quickly separate foreground action from complex backgrounds is alone worth the cost of the program) and the updated version of mocha’s very slick planer motion tracker.

If you’re new to AE (you’ll learn to use the abbreviation in most cases), you might want to watch the interview of Chris and Trish on John Dickinson’s Motionworks site about how to break into the effects biz. There’s also a useful interview at Lynda, which talks about “where they came from, who inspires them, and what the future holds.”

Nvidia brought two major product chipsets to CES: the Tegra CPU (for netbooks and tablet computers) and its new top of the line GPU, the GF100, nicknamed Fermi.

Nvidia’s Tegra 2 processor goes up directly against Intel’s Atom, which comes in just about every netbook out there it seems. Just now getting on the market, the Tegra 2 is based on the well-regarded Arm processor core, long valued for its low power chops.

Nvidia targets the chip at devices with 5-inch to 15-inch screens; the dual-core processor can play back 1080p high-definition video while conserving battery life, an advantage over Intel’s product. Innovative Converged Devices, Asus, and T-Mobile were among companies showing concept products built around the Tegra. Lenovo used another Arm-based CPU, from Qualcomm, for its lightweight, Linux-based Skylight smartbook.

For anyone involved in graphics and animation—or if you’re an avid gamer—Nvidia’s Fermi GF100 was the draw. Naming it to honor the famed physicist Enrico Fermi is more than just a cute marketing ploy: besides offering high-performance ray tracing, the massive chip (over 3 billion transistors, compared to the previous generation GPU’s 1.4 billion) has 512 CUDA cores and other specific circuitry to boost physics, finite element analysis, and other high-precision scientific computing tasks. Nvidia offers an interesting series of overviews on Fermi here.

The Fermi chip, expected to release by March, supports Microsoft’s new DirectX 11 architecture, offers hardware support for boosting GPU voltage and other tricks beloved of overclockers, and provides a complete hardware decode for 3D-based Blu-ray.

Quick overview video on Fermi

Nvidia’s CES blog

Check out the chip’s capability of generating real time physical effects in games in this video of a demo.

For those who want more detail, here’s a good tech overview.

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.