In the multifaceted world of postproduction, many people play a role in bringing a complex production to life. We’re familiar with the duties of editors and assistant editors; visual effects artists and animators; and composers and sound designers.

Of course, no such list would be complete without the important contributions of the colorist.

While some dose of color correction is included in most NLEs and compositing programs, to garner the full benefits of the technique requires dedicated color correction software and hardware. Color correction is at once technical and artistic. Ideally, a color grader is someone who employs the principles of color theory as second nature. He or she needs to also understand the subtle nuances that color plays in story telling, whether for a feature film, a music video or television commercial.

This isn’t really news, but it’s a good introduction for a discussion about DaVinci Resolve, the sophisticated and advanced color correction system from Blackmagic Design.

Proven Power

Resolve was originally a creation of Da Vinci Systems Ltd. The Coral Springs, Florida-based company had long been a leader for over 25 years in professional color grading for high-end post. About a year ago, Blackmagic Design acquired the company. Blackmagic, an Australian company, is of course a leading manufacturer of a bounty of hardware products used widely in the feature film, postproduction and television broadcast industries.

Nice move on Blackmagic’s part, I’d say. They’re already well known for creating quality products with incredibly low-ball prices such as capture/playback cards, disk recorders, monitors, converters, encoders and switchers. Yet with the acquisition of the highly esteemed DaVinci Resolve system, they have gained even more ground in the sexy world of high-end color postproduction, hardware and software.

According to Blackmagic, DaVinci Resolve has been used to grade more feature films, television commercials, documentaries, episodic television productions and music videos than any other color grading system. The system has been used on such features as Avatar, Transformers, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood, Quantum of Solace as well as numerous independent and smaller productions.

Company 3 has installed eight DaVinci Resolve systems in their NY and LA offices (read our article about them here). Other high profile post houses include Hollywood’s Technicolor, London’s Deluxe 142 and Out of the Blue, a post house here in Manhattan, which opened for business in 2010.

Micah Kirz, one of the founders of Out of the Blue, says, “I love Resolve because even though DaVinci has evolved, Blackmagic has been careful to make sure the fundamentals stay the same. Resolve was made for colorists, with colorist input, and has the tools colorists need. The user interface is intuitive, and it’s pretty much everything I could ever need to produce work that I’m proud of.”

Blackmagic has just released version 8.1 of DaVinci Resolve. I’ll go over some of the new features later. We begin, however, with an overview of the whole system.

Command and Control

Blackmagic has made an impressive colorist control surface to use with Resolve. It’s got rings, buttons and trackballs, all of which greatly enhances the use of the software. While Resolve can, in fact, be operated with a mouse, the control surface can speed up your workflow by a factor of 200 percent or more according to professional opinion, and allows you to do multiple tasks at once. Aside from the increase in productivity, the control surface looks great, will impress your clients and give your boutique an air of exclusivity that may, in fact, help you justify in charging the big bucks.

The price for DaVinci Resolve software is $995, a fee that even the most cost-conscious studio could afford (consider that just a few years ago the cost of Resolve system was $200,000 and up). The DaVinci Resolve colorist control surface, however, prices at $29,995, with a license for the Resolve software license included.

Those seeking a less expensive control surface have several options and can choose from alternatives from Tangent, J.L. Cooper and Avid. Below is an image of the Tangent Wave.

Working With Resolve

Getting your sequence from your NLE into Resolve is a breeze, even if it has multiple video tracks and transitions. Assuming your NLE has XML export (and most of the major ones now do), you simply export an XML file and import it into Resolve. The video tracks, clips, edits and transitions will all be correctly referenced and you are free to do operations that you would usually do inside your NLE right inside of Resolve, such as moving shots to a different layer, changing the length of transitions and editing in and out points.

I think the interface of the DaVinci Resolve software is well laid out. There’s a viewer on the left where you can see the results of your work. In the middle, there is a gallery where you can store presets that you have defined along with stills for easy reference. To the right of that is the node graph.

Those who have worked with nodes in other applications (such as compositors or 3D animation programs) will already be aware of the advantages of this approach. It’s a visual way of working that allows you to quickly and intuitively change the connections between the nodes to suit different purposes. Each node you add is a full color corrector and you can keep adding nodes for each color corrector you add to the shot. Nodes can, of course, be masked to only affect a portion of the screen and the masks can be given soft edges and gradients.

Under the node graph is the project timeline where you can see the thumbnails of each shot in your movie. Towards the bottom left of the interface is the primary color control area where you can change the gamma, lift and gain. Other color grading apps might refer to this as three-way color correction.

To the right of the primary controls is an area where one can access color adjustment curves, blurs, keying, and other effects. At the bottom right is a clip timeline where you set keyframes (or dynamics as Resolve likes to call them) for parameters in the current clip that you want to change over time.

Resolve handles a remarkable number of camera formats including RED, ARRI, Open EXR and ProRes. It also easily handles H.264 files from a Canon 5D Mark II, with no transcoding necessary.

I was especially impressed with the remarkably fast and precise 3D motion tracker, which automatically sets up a detailed point cloud on the moving image and uses it to glean data for tracking. Equally impressive was the motion stabilizer that quickly and correctly stabilizes footage taken with a shaky camera.

Once you’re done with all your color work, getting it all back into your NLE is pretty much done the same way you brought it in. Simply export an XML file and read it into your editing program. All the graded shots are properly linked and your timeline is updated with any changes.

Performance

DaVinci Resolve, like Adobe’s Mercury Playback engine, takes advantage of commercially available NVIDIA CUDA GPUs, which seriously boosts real-time performance. Because of this it is recommended that you get at least a second video card and more if you can afford it, since each will add to the speed of the interface as well as rendering.

If you’re all out of PCI slots for additional GPUs, you can get a neat product from CUBIX called the GPU-Xpander which will grant you additional PCI slots in an external enclosure without overheating your computer or overburdening its power supply. It works with high-powered GPUs such as the NVIDIA Quadro series.

Version 8.1

As I was writing this piece, a new update of Resolve was released. Here’s a quick report on some of the noteworthy new features in version 8.1.

Final Cut Pro X users can now import and export FCP Pro X timelines using the new rich XML format round trip. This means that timelines can be moved in and out of Resolve with even more details than before (such as speed changes). Avid users also will enjoy better integration and compatibility when importing and exporting between Media Composer and Resolve.

The new version also now includes layer node composite effects such as add, subtract, difference, multiply, screen, overlay, darken and lighten effects. After Effects and Photoshop users will no doubt be familiar with these modes and the creative possibilities they offer.

DaVinci Resolve 8.1 now includes ACES colorspace support, the new file format promoted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences technology committee to provide a universal and open image interchange and processing format.

Other new features include enhancements to the interface as well as support for Blackmagic’s video capture and playback device UltraStudio 3D for Thunderbolt.

Conclusion

As I’ve noted, prior to Blackmagic’s acquiring the company last year, the price of a Da Vinci Resolve system cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s now just under a grand. This has caused many to rejoice. In addition, Resolve Lite, a limited but still useful version of the software is available for free from Blackmagic’s website. (The app runs on the latest iMacs, 17-inch MacBook Pro and Mac Pro computers.)

You can use Lite for your own projects without restriction and it is a great way to get into Resolve. It does have limits, of course. For example, projects can only run in SD and HD resolutions with only two color correction nodes available. Once you take to it, though, you’ll want to get the full version.

Resolve is currently available for Linux systems and Macintosh. The Linux version offers more power because it’s based on a cluster of Linux computers with high performance GPU cards, so all processing is real time. According to Blackmagic, you can start with a single computer on Mac OS X for lower cost, then upgrade to Linux for extra power for high resolutions such as 2K or 4K, stereoscopic 3D feature films or real time grading of raw RED files.

For Windows users, Blackmagic has announced that in the first quarter of 2012, Resolve for Windows will begin shipping. This is exciting and welcome news since there are fewer choices for high-end CUDA GPUs on the Macintosh platform where you’re limited to a Quadro 4000. Workstations such as the HP Z800 which run the Windows OS, however, accepts all of the NVIDIA GPUs including the Quadro 5000 and 6000. The Windows version will be a free update to all licensed users.

DaVinci Resolve offers a whole world of professional color correction at an astounding price, considering what one would have needed to pay for it before. Now that it comes from Blackmagic, a potent force in the industry and a company that, in my opinion, knows how to do things right, it is even more compelling.

— Dan Ochiva contributed to this article

(Image: Presenting his new film ‘Twixt’, Francis Ford Coppola tries on an Edgar Allan Poe mask that contains 3D glasses.)

The Past Week(s) in Review: For August 22 and August 29, 2011

This edition of TPWR covers the past two weeks of news.

We search for the more interesting and provocative news and views of the past week…just so you don’t have to.

This week we share the good news about local production, learn about a filter that can save you from DSLR headaches, and find out that an older, established filmmaker is more experimental than ever.

Mayor Bloomberg on the set of Pan Am with Media & Entertainment Commissioner Oliver and other officials. Photo credit: The Mayor’s Office.

Upbeat about Production

More good news on the growing number of prime time TV shows filming throughout the five boroughs. According to a recent press conference held by Mayor Bloomberg, we have some 23 shows now shooting regularly; eight of them were selected from 20 pilots shot in the city earlier this year.

Bloomberg made the announcement from the Steiner Studios stages of Sony Pictures Television’s “Pan Am”, set to debut on ABC this fall. Steiner, based in the Brooklyn Navy Yards, is now expanding to double its size. It is already the largest soundstage production facility on the East Coast, with the expansion adding some 2000 jobs to the 2200 jobs at throughout the Yard.

In a release, Steiner Studios Chairman Douglas C. Steiner thanked the Bloomberg administration for its continued support of the entertainment industry. “This onslaught of film and television production is a direct result of the mayor and other elected officials working together to make New York City competitive and hassle-free,” he said. This was taken from an article in The Hollywood Reporter, which you can read here.

Variety credits recently enacted long-term tax incentives granted by the state. An improvement over the previous year-by-year incentive extensions, the five year term offers a more stable environment for the studios for budgeting and other planning. The Variety article says that business boosters, including local studio heads, have learned to be “savvy in lobbying for production incentives at the state capital.”

QR Talk

Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, won the director the fest’s Directing Award. Major prize talk continues to build for Durkin as well as actors Elizabeth Olsen and John Hawkes well in advance of the film’s October 21st release. But there also seems to be a good bit of interest in Fox Searchlight’s use of QR (quick response) codes on early posters to trigger the trailers.

The gimmick here is that the previews aren’t available any other way online–you really do have to use your smartphone to scan the QR codes on posters you might find on the streets of Manhattan, Brooklyn, or Los Angeles–to get to these specific trailers. Entertainment Weekly’s Inside Movies claims to have had the scoop on the first use of these smart-phone-only posters.

Photo credit: MGM
Kubrick Invents the iPad, Personal TV Follows

Seems that it’s not the monolith from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey that garners interest these days but the “iPad like” TV notepads two of the astronauts on the Jupiter probe use. Samsung indeed cites these objects in the movie–they’re the size of a notepad and feature a functional video screen–as an example of prior art in its court case against Apple, who claims the Korean manufacturer has infringed its patented iPad design. You can read further details on Foss Patent’s blog here.

Following the lead of personal media, John Clancy, CEO at Azuki Systems, writes on Mashable that the future TV is “all about personalization.” We all knew that, and Clancy’s company makes platforms for mobile phones enabling cable companies and others to offer a good video experience on the go.

The basic argument isn’t new either: Since viewers no longer make plans to sit down and view specific content on a regular basis–we all want content whenever and wherever we happen to be–cable companies and channels like HBO want to offer video service alternatives that keeps up with their viewer’s habits.

While content creators and service providers are “making a mad dash to get screen time on mobile and other connected devices”, these new delivery options are stumbling because experience is not seamless when using the various devices. Azuki, of course, provides the one item Clancy says is lacking–the “key ingredient for success — personalization.” Metadata behind the video is used to split longer shows into smaller chunks so that viewers can catch clips on the go. Worth a read if just to learn how much control can be exerted over your distributed video.

Photo credit: metaio
Siggraph Notes, AR, & ARRI

Over at Studio Daily, editor Beth Marchant offers a quick take on SIGGRAPH 2011. Top tech presentations at the show in Vancouver, says Marchant, included Nvidia’s Project Maximus (a graphics technology that allows users to access and scale different parts of the GPU as needed) and Amazon’s “Cluster GPU Instance for its EC2″ –this service allows smaller facilities to rent processing power to render scenes. Meanwhile, BlackSky Computing ups the ante on cloud computing schemes like Amazon’s EC2 cloud by claiming it isn’t very effective beyond the capability of working with short sequences. BlackSky may enter the market for high-performance processing and rendering with its own competing service.

Augmented reality may offer a whole new way to use smartphones, or it could just be a gimmick for gamers. With that conclusion still up for grabs, you might take a look at an intriguing video “Roadmap of AR and the Vision of an Augmented City” to get a better idea of what the latest developments offer. Created by the Media Processing Division of chipmaker ARM and the R&D department of German-based AR company metaio, the video shows how more powerful smartphones capable of realtime 3D motion tracking will provide real-time contextual, digital information overlaying urban scenes.

You have to wonder why they haven’t offered this already since the Munich-based company has been around for much of the history of cinema, but ARRI CSC has launched its own Expendables Online Shop. Found at arricscstore.com, the store offers all the items you’ll need for handling camera, lighting, and grip work.

Photo credit: Kevin Brown
Wormholes, CDN Woes, & Bird Talk

In an area within MIT’s student cafeteria, you can find a Plexiglas dome that sits over a video screen. You can find the exact similar setup in Stanford University’s cafeteria. What is it? First, consider that there is an always on, high-speed link between the two conversation areas. (The plexi dome acts as a chamber to funnel audio while not disturbing others nearby.) Meant to make realtime long-distance interactions casual and arbitrary, the designers of the system act all science-fictioney by calling the link a wormhole. See if it heralds the future of long distance interactive communication by reading the the rest of the article on the Boston Globe’s site.

Over on the GigaOM site, reporter Stacey Higginbotham offers us an inside look at content delivery specialist Akamai and the “scary future of streaming video.” Seems that within two to five years, the throughput requirement for certain single video events will reach some 50 to 100 terabits per second. That is about the equivalent bandwidth of what it takes to distribute a TV quality stream to a large prime time audience today. Problem is that this is an “order of magnitude” beyond the largest online video events held today, according to Higginbotham, and that’s without adding all of bells & whistles of interactivity, which many claim we desperately want. See what you think by reading the article here.

The LA Times interviews Pixar’s Brad Bird for an article entitled “Hollywood isn’t Brave Enough to Copy Pixar’s Process”. While Pixar has become “the gold standard among popcorn films”, Bird opines, Hollywood studios are doing everything to copy the famed animation studio except actually taking the time and effort to really, truly develop a good story first. A good storyline is a central tenet of the vaunted Pixar process. Read more about Bird’s thoughts on current trends in animation by clicking here.

Photo credit: Mosaic Engineering
DSLR’s Savior, Flash & Jobs

In short review/article on his site, DSLR enthusiast Philip Bloom claims a new anti-aliasing and moire filter from Mosaic Engineering solves the two most serious problems–aliasing and moire generation–you will face when shooting with Canon’s 5DmkII. It seems the filter removes the interference patterns on details that are generated by the camera’s line skipping. Is this a simple cure for what Bloom calls the “bane of shooting with DSLRs and the single biggest problem”? Read it here and decide.

Fast and efficient Flash memory rules in the world of consumer computing (i.e. iPads, smartphones, digital cameras). Except in limited cases, the price of solid-state storage has remained too high to allow it to move into the world of large-scale computing like data centers. Now, Pure Storage, a new start up, says that it can use consumer level flash storage along with its software to pull the price of Flash storage down to less than that of hard drives. That’s a mighty achievement if true. Read more here in Steve Lohr’s article in the Times’ Bits blog.

There have been plenty of testimonials to Steve Jobs on his resignation from Apple. At least read one of them from someone who has something to do with our industry: Here’s a note from George Lucas, who sold Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division to Jobs, a sale which famously created Pixar Animation Studios. But of course that only came after a number of years of development and many millions invested in the new operation. Read more of Nick Wingfield’s article in the reporter’s Wall Street Journal blog by clicking here.

Elle Fanning & Coppola on the set of ‘Twixt’
Still Going Strong

Francis Ford Coppola brought Val Kilmer and the composer of his latest film Twixt to the recent Comic Con convention for a talk. What made that panel more than just the usual dog and pony, says reporter Jason Adams on JoBlo.com, is that this original horror tale-said to be inspired by one of Coppola’s own dreams–will be presented as a live performance. That’s right–Coppola claims to be returning to the early days of cinema when things weren’t so locked down to present some of the “magic and spontaneity of live performance art”.

Coppola, working with electronic musician and soundtrack composer Dan Deacon will “change the experience to suit the audience” in real time. Read more about the ever experimenting FFC and his new idea for presentation by clicking here. Twixt premieres at next month’s Toronto International Film Festival.

As an aside: If you would be curious to see how an earlier, eager Coppola marked up a page from “The Godfather”–and a heavily marked up page it is with “Hit hard and bloody!!” among the exhortations he made to himself–then click here.

Raul Ruiz
Memories of a Cine Magician

Raul Ruiz, the little heralded filmmaker (at least in the U.S.), passed away recently. (If you haven’t had a chance to see one of his many intriguing works, check out his transfixing Mysteries of Lisbon, which is still showing at Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center.)

Producer James Schamus posted a touching remembrance on Scott Macauley’s IndieWIRE blog, calling the director/author “one of the truly great, idiosyncratic and visionary voices of world cinema.” Both Schamus and Macauley—along with a raft of downtown notables of the time including Christine Vachon, Michael Kirby, John Zorn, Kathy Acker, and Jim Jarmusch—worked or acted in Ruiz’s 1987 film The Golden Boat, a goof on the New York art scene at the time.

This bit from AP’s obit sums up his career neatly: “A favorite of cinephiles, Ruiz rebelled against the conventions of moviemaking in an extensive, varied body of work that didn’t result in a widely-known masterpiece, but left behind a vast, labyrinthine collection of experiments, curiosities and innovations.”

A Great Combo for Adobe Premiere" />

If you are a media production professional, you’ll want to take a good look at the HP Z800 workstation. When paired with a NVIDIA Quadro GPU accelerated video card we’re talking about a system that achieves an outstanding level of performance. Whether you are an editor of motion pictures, a compositor, visual effects artist or create high-end 3D animation, the HP Z800 workstation has a design that’s ideal for the special needs of production and post-production professionals who are searching for the utmost in power and flexibility. As we’ll be discussing throughout this article, this should be especially relevant to video editors who may be looking for new directions in light of recent developments in that field.

Editing’s Changing Tides

Before we go over the machine, let’s elaborate on recent news that has recently made the Z800 much more compelling to a segment of our community, namely film and video editors, who may have overlooked it before. It should come as no surprise that Apple’s recent release of Final Cut Pro X has thrown this group into a frenzy, since the new app throws out many of the pro features and third party plug-ins developed over the years. One company’s NLE is suddenly benefiting greatly from this unease, specifically Adobe Premiere Pro, and interest in this cost-effective professional solution continues to grow as a result. (Read Walter Biscardi’s rather bitter farewell to Apple’s FCP X NLE solution to get an idea of what’s involved in this issue).

Due to the early success of a few key software packages, Windows-based machines have basically become the standard in 3D animation production. The leading computer manufacturer for both Windows and Linux — HP — exemplifies this, as it has built a longstanding relationship with DreamWorks Animation.

However, due the development of Final Cut Pro over the past 12 some years since its introduction, including a number of third party plug-ins that solved crucial issues, many professional video and film editors moved to Macs for their work. (Meanwhile 2D compositing is done on both platforms). The most common editing program used on the Mac, outside of the consumer-oriented iMovie, has been Final Cut Pro; it has been used extensively here in New York at production companies, ad agencies, design boutiques and by indie filmmakers. In the meantime, Avid Media Composer, the long time leader for feature film and television, had been losing seats to FCP.

Now, unless you’ve been hiking through the Himalayas for the last couple of months, you’ve probably heard something about the controversy surrounding the new version of Final Cut Pro. For those who might have missed it, let’s just say that many FCP users are less than thrilled about the new release (and by the way, welcome back from the Himalayas).

Some have said that the new version of Final Cut doesn’t live up to the standards of a professional editing application, having more having more in common with a consumer-grade product (such as iMovie). It also doesn’t open older versions of Final Cut projects and no longer supports some pro features like multi-cam editing and XML export. To many, these are serious shortcomings that have led some to question the level of commitment Apple has to the professional market. There have been some improvements to the software, and some of the objections that have been raised might be addressed in future versions. Yet many editors remain discontent and have been casting their glance towards software that suddenly seems like it is much better suited to the needs of professional editors: Adobe Premiere Pro, which really shines, for reasons we’re about to explore, on an HP Z800 workstation.

In fact, over the past couple of years we’ve already noticed a steady rise in the popularity and capabilities of Premiere Pro. This can be attributed to several factors, many of which were described during the recent Adobe Roadshow for Production Premium CS 5.5 in New York where Adobe, in explicit detail, explained to an appreciative audience many of its exciting new features. Incidentally, at the Roadshow, Adobe used a Z800 during the demonstrations, but we’ll be talking much more about the special relationship that has blossomed between Adobe and HP later.

Some of Premiere’s benefits include better support for native tapeless file-based camera formats (such as HD H.264 editing directly in the timeline), generated by popular cameras such as the Canon 5D Mark II. More support for native camera formats means less time wasting time transcoding. You can just drop a file directly from the camera’s memory card into the timeline and start editing without extra fussing. Then there is Adobe Dynamic Linking, a feature that eliminates intermediate rendering between the different programs in the Creative Suite.

Ironically, Premiere was one of the first video editing apps commercially available, but for whatever reasons it ended up taking a back seat to Final Cut. As Adobe’s other software programs such as After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash emerged as industry standards, Premiere lagged behind. Far from abandoning it, however, Adobe steadily continued to improve it. The question is in light of the recent developments, has Premiere’s day finally and suddenly arrived?

If you have come to that conclusion yourself, then you may wish to consider getting an HP Z800 since it may very well be the best choice to build an ultimate high-end editing system based upon Premiere Pro.

Thanks to the CPU/chip set’s 64-bit capability, the Z800’s 12 DIMM slots can support an unprecedented 192GB of DDR3 1333 MHz triple channel RAM. The machine we used to conduct this review was running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit, had 24GBs of memory, dual six-core Xeons, a Quadro 5000 GPU, SSD (solid-state drive) to hold the OS and apps while dual terabyte hard drives were configured into a 2TB RAID. HP, which provided and configured the rig, also included a USB 3.0 card.

Born to Run, Built to Last

Upon first glance, the Z800 is impressive looking with a sleek industrial design. No surprise since the looks come courtesy BMW Designworks. The computer is handsomely appointed on both sides with sturdy brushed aluminum side panels. These panels not only look good but provide heavy duty protection against the elements. Simple touches show the thought of the design, such as the sturdy handles built into the top, which makes it a cinch to move around. The remarkable design of the machine isn’t just skin deep, however, and this becomes immediately apparent when looking inside the minitower.

Look Ma, No Tools!

Opening the Z800 is easy in just the way it should be: you just grab a handle and pull off one of the side panels. No time wasted unfastening bolts or screws. Once opened, an impressively sleek and modular design, rather than a confusing mess of cluttered wires, ribbons and cables, greets you. The intelligently architected interior provides easy access to all of the internal components, each neatly covered by easily removable panels that snap into place.

The principle of tool-less serviceability and upgrading has been consciously applied to the Z800. This is something that HP has been perfecting over a while and now the whole process has become slick and effortless. It is perhaps best exemplified by the power supply which sits at the top of the unit. If anything should ever go wrong with it, you simply slide it out and slide in a new one. It’s really that simple and completely cable-less with no tricky screws or bolts to remove. Replacing a typical power supply can be a complicated and tricky proposition as you tug at tight fitting plugs in snug quarters. Not in the HP Z800.

Here’s a video I made showing how to access the interior of the machine. It also provides other information about the system and its components:

This is a RAID

For editors, storage is one of the most important considerations. Video requires a lot of it and it must be fast. A RAID (array of drives configured to work simultaneously) setup has become the standard way to go for years. The Z800 allows you to put up to five 3.5 inch 7200 rpm SATA drives, each up to 2 TB, for a maximum of 10 TB of online storage which will allow you to store many hours of HD.

The hard drive bay is located towards the front of the machine in a neat and tidy stack of drawers. To remove a drive you simply pull it out by its handle. Adding one is a matter of pushing it in. Once again, no need to worry about complicated mounting brackets or tiny screws. The Z800’s integrated SATA 3 GBs and SAS controllers are RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 capable. With the online price of a 7200rpm 2 TB hard drive going for about 79 bucks, it’s not only a snap to install a high volume, speedy RAID — it’s also cheap.

While the solid-state memory used in SSDs is not yet cost-effective to use in building a RAID, you do have the option to go with an SSD as your boot disk for the OS and applications. You’d still use the cheaper, high capacity drives for the RAID. This is a good mix that takes advantage of a SSDs’ speed and reliability and the cost savings of older gen magnetic storage. That’s just how the machine used in this review was configured.

Thanks for the Memory

The Z800 comes with 12 DIMM (dual in-line memory module) slots that allow you to install an astounding 192 GB memory, which comes via the CPU/OS both supporting 64 bit operation. While it is unlikely you’ll endow your machine with that much memory at first, it’s reassuring to know you can down the line. The machine I tested had 24 GB of RAM which is generous enough for most users. With the ample memory and the speedy internal SSD, I was able to run multiple programs concurrently and the Z800 handled it in stride. Programs such as Premiere, Cinema 4D, After Effects, Maya, Photoshop and others sprang to life quickly and there was enough memory to go around for each to operate comfortably at the same time.

The Heart of the Matter

Two six-core Xeon processors lay at the heart of the test machine and add up to twelve cores, the maximum number available on a Z800 (you have a choice of eight different Xeon X5000 and E5000 series CPUs). Premiere Pro has long been multi-threaded and multi-core aware, and was designed to take advantage of all the power the dual Xeons can muster.

Since Creative Suite 5, Premiere will only run on 64 bit operating systems. After Effects 5.5 also requires a 64 bit OS. However, Production Premium CS 5.5 ships with a complementary version of Premiere Pro and After Effects CS4, which do run in 32 bit, so if you have an older machine, you can use them temporarily until you purchase a new one.

The Ultimate Video Card

If HP’s Z-series are the top of the shelf workstations, to many Nvidia’s Quadro line of GPUs are the ultimate video cards. Today, standard definition (SD) (720 pixels X 480 pixels) video editing is practically a memory, and editing in HD resolution (1920 X 1080) has become the norm. Relatively inexpensive HD cameras such as the Canon 5D and Sony NEX FS-100 are capable of producing excellent results and are a popular choice among independent producers and television shows. However, higher end cameras from ARRI and Sony can shoot at 2K resolution (2048 X 1152), and the RED ONE can shoot at 4K (4096 X 2304), which is over four times the resolution of HD. While most productions don’t yet use 4K capture, it’s very useful for commercials and effects heavy films, where extensive effects compositing is planned.

At the heart of Premiere Pro CS5.5 is the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine (MPE), a software technology developed by Adobe to handle the considerable demands placed on your system by this growing trend towards higher resolution workflows. MPE incorporates NVIDIA CUDA parallel processing architecture. When accelerated by a Quadro series card, you’ll get real-time previewing and editing of native, high-resolution footage.

There are three Quadro models you should consider when buying a Z800, namely the 4000, 5000 and 6000. All of them accelerate the Mercury Playback Engine. The system we tested came with a Quadro 5000, a high-end card with 2.5 GB RAM which can easily handle multiple streams of HD video but can also handle 4K editing as well. For those working very heavily in 4K, you may wish to opt for the higher end (and costlier) Quadro 6000 which has 6 GB of memory and can edit multiple streams of RED 4K video at once.

However, if your workflow is primarily HD with a dose of 4K in the mix, the Quadro 5000 will provide ample horsepower to kick the MPE into high gear. Aside from real-time editing previews, the Quadro accelerated MPE will also significantly improve the speed of the final encoding of your video — up to a claimed 13 times faster.

A Walk in the Park

For my testing of the Z800, I shot HD footage in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park with a Canon camera and transferred it onto the 2 TB RAID. Once inside of Premiere, I set the playback resolution of the program to 100-percent at 1920 X 1080 (the highest setting possible for HD). This forced Premiere to display all of the pixels during the real time preview (by default, Premiere is set to 50-percent which degrades the image, but plays back more smoothly from the timeline).

Normally, if you are using only one monitor, editing at full size and resolution is impractical since it commands too much of your screen’s real estate without leaving enough room for Premiere’s timeline and controls. However, that was not the case for me, thanks to the test system’s enormous 30 inch HP ZR30w monitor with its 2560 X 1650 display resolution (more about the monitor later).

While I cut the shots from the park together, I added fades and cross dissolves and applied color correction as well. Although Premiere was set at the maximum resolution, it didn’t skip a beat — even when I put four streams of HD video on the screen at once. Playback was smooth and scrubbing through the timeline was fluid. To be certain, the Z800’s speedy RAID, dual Xeons, Quadro, generous amount of RAM and the Mercury Playback Engine all contributed to the snappy feel.

Adobe Dynamic Linking

Although many factors make Premiere an attractive alternative to dissatisfied Final Cut users, one of the strongest cases that can be made for it is the way it integrates with the entire Adobe Creative Suite, especially After Effects (but also Encore, Audition, Flash and the rest of the gang).

After Effects is one of the bedrocks of our industry, needless to say. It’s used heavily in New York City and is popular around the world for compositing, motion graphics, visual effects, title design, color keying, animation, and much more. It is, in fact, such as versatile program, and is put to so many different uses, that it almost defies characterization.

Within CS 5.5 Production Premium, Premiere and After Effects are able to communicate with each other by utilizing a feature called Adobe Dynamic Link, which allows you to eliminate the tedious intermediate renderings that you once needed to do between the two applications. Here’s an example: suppose you are working on editing a film and one of the shots require special effects or compositing in After Effects. Traditionally, the process has been to drop the live action backplate into a comp in After Effects, add other layers, cut masks, apply effects and set key frames. When it was ready, you would render it out to your hard drive as an intermediate movie file and import that file into Premiere.

As it happens more often than not, however, at some point you’d probably need to make some modifications to the shot (like move around some key frames or scale something down). So you would go back to After Effects, make the necessary adjustments, render out the intermediate movie file again and replace the old one in Premiere.

With Adobe Dynamic Linking, however, it is no longer necessary to waste time on this. Instead of rendering an intermediate file, you simply open the After Effects comp in Premiere with all of its layers, keyframes, and effects intact and slip it into your timeline where it is treated as any other piece of footage. You are free to set in and out points and otherwise edit it in any way you like, and when it comes time to make a change to the shot, you simply switch back over to After Effects, make the change and switch back. No rendering or intermediate files needed and thanks to Mercury, real time previews of dynamically linked After Effect projects play back efficiently.

I have been a long time After Effects user, having worked intimately with it for fifteen years. I have also edited with Premiere for years now. However, it has only been since its inclusion in CS 5.5 that I have started using Adobe Dynamic Linking between them. If you are an After Effects or Premiere Pro user and have never experienced it before, let me tell you, it’s a game changer. The interplay between the two applications will open up a whole new perspective on the way you work.

With Dynamic Linking, I am now bouncing back and forth between both programs and feel like I am working in one unified creative environment. Changes made in After Effects are immediately reflected in the edit. This is truly an important development in the way the Creative Suite works. Once you start using it, Dynamic Linking is sure to become an important part of your workflow.

The HP Performance Advisor

Workstations are complex and highly configurable machines, and like any sophisticated instrument, they can and should be tuned in order to operate more efficiently. It’s also useful to have a straightforward way to monitor their performance. For a number of years, HP workstations have come with a useful and unique piece of software called the HP Performance Advisor which helps you easily configure the software and components in your system to work better, while providing you with detailed information in one complete area.

By viewing the HP Performance Advisor’s block diagram, you can see a visual representation of the components installed in your Z800 without having to open up the case. By clicking on the GPU, for example, you can find the model number and how much memory it has. You can also learn how busy your GPU has been and even get assistance in choosing the correct graphics driver for it without having to search all over the web. Once you find the correct driver, you can download and install it right from within the Performance Advisor.

The HP Performance Advisor also helps manage your apps by implementing the correct configuration and BIOS settings as recommended by the manufacturer. I found this to be a very useful way to learn about which system resources are utilized by each application as well as which options are turned on or off.

Other important components of the Performance Advisor are the Memory Graph and the Application Monitor. The Memory Graph provides a visual representation of the memory usage for all of the applications running on your machine at any given instant while the Application Monitor collects information about how your applications are using system resources over an extended period of time.

More about the HP Performance monitor can be seen in this HP video.

What about 3D?

Although this review has focused on the Z800 primarily as a platform for editing, I also spent time running 3D animation software on it, specifically Cinema 4D and Maya 2012. Needless to say, both programs performed outstandingly. The current crop of Nvidia Quadro cards, which do much to accelerate the Mercury Playback Engine, also feature an engineering innovation called Fermi. According to Nvidia, the Fermi architecture is a technological breakthrough that offers 5 times faster 3D performance than previously available, delivering an astounding 1.3 billion triangles per second. This performance was readily apparent.

The HP ZR30w Display

Along with the HP Z800, I had the opportunity to review the HP ZR30w high performance display. Engineered for compatibility with the Z-series of workstations, this ultra-high resolution monitor (2560 X 1600) echoes the design of the tower, being framed by brushed aluminum. It looked great sitting next to the workstation, and plugged into the Quadro 5000 via a dual-link DVI cable.

The ZR30w employs In Plane Switching (IPS) LCD technology which is considered superior to Twisted Nemetic (TN) technology, (used on cheaper, lower-quality displays). IPS allows ultra-wide viewing angles so the monitor looks good wherever you stand, while offering the ability of better color rendition.

The ZR30w displays 10 bit color (30 bits per pixel) for an amazing 1.07 billion possible different colors per pixel compared to the 16.7 million colors per pixel available on eight bit systems. For those doing compositing, this helps reduce banding artifacts, which sometimes can be a problem on displays with lower bit depths.

The ZR30w display also features HP Direct Drive Architecture. This means that the high performance IPS panel is connected to the graphics card in such a way which enables it to directly drive it at its full, native resolution without extra intervening electronics such as a scalar processor. When a display is driven in this way, it provides the best possible image quality. Other benefits of Direct Drive include less video latency, less power consumption and less heat generation. Also, digital color values take a more direct path from the graphics card to the LCD.

Solidly built, the ZR30w sits on a sturdy base and like the Z800, it looks ready to take on punishing levels of abuse. It also has a 4-port USB hub so you can handily plug in any USB devices right into the display.

Thoughts About the Industry

As noted earlier, questions have arisen in the minds of many postproduction professionals about Apple’s commitment to the pro market.

If you keep up with the regular postings on pro forums about this issue, it’s apparent that we are on the cusp of a user revolt that could well topple the current NLE market leader, Apple’s Final Cut Pro. I now edit exclusively with Adobe Premiere Pro on 64-bit Windows 7. For those who are thinking of switching but might have reservations, my opinion is that you won’t be disappointed.

With the Z800, HP has designed a workstation to the highest possible standards of performance and industrial design. Granted, there may be those who’ll hesitate to step out of their comfort zone, but for independent minded individuals looking to build a top notch system for Premiere, we think that there is currently no better choice than the HP Z800.

Let’s explain our thinking. In the late 1980s and into the next decade, both Apple and Adobe benefited symbiotically from the desktop publishing revolution. This was fueled by the liberating power of PostScript, along with innovative apps such as Photoshop and Illustrator. In the nineties, a similar thing happened with video, with low cost After Effects upsetting the domination of high-priced compositing systems.

While some of its early apps appeared first on Macintoshes, eventually all of Adobe’s software became available on the Windows platform. That made sense, since there are vastly more PCs sold than any other computing platform. Today, the best professional graphics software is available on both platforms.

This may or may not have led to a gradual falling out between Adobe and Apple, something that has become more apparent to us over the past few years. The decision by Apple not to include support for Flash on the iPhone and iPad, a decision that surprised many, may be one sign of a possible strained relationship between the two companies.

In the meantime, the bond between Adobe and HP grew. Now Adobe officially endorses HP technology and the two companies’ engineers collaborate closely in the design of their products so as to ensure maximum compatibility. As an example of this close working relationship, check out this video in which Adobe makes specific recommendations as to which HP workstations to get.

If the gulf between Apple and Adobe may at times look like it’s widening, the bond between HP and Adobe seems to be strengthening. For editors looking to get into Premiere, whose utmost concern is engineering, the platform of choice may very well shift. Will HP become the platform best suited to demanding video professionals? We’re not sure, but if the editing crowd embraces Premiere en masse, the HP Z800 may very well emerge as the leading machine to edit with.

In reading the many postings on the web, Premiere looks like the most qualified successor for serious professionals. (Avid Media Composer, however, still reigns in high-end post for features and commercials.) In response to this recent spike in interest, Adobe has offered a 50-percent off of Production Premium for current FCP users who are considering switching.

Who can be sure if this is truly a harbinger of things to come? Apple, as usual, offers few cues as to its plans. As Final Cut still sits at the heart of many individual and pro production suites, the Cupertino-based company may suddenly decide to take measures to correct these missteps and appease the outrage of full-time editors. Or, then again, perhaps they feel their future lies in mainstream consumers of its iPhones, iPads, iPods, and iMacs, and that an app that’s been described as “iMovie on steroids” is the better way to go.

In any case, it’s safe to say that the prevailing opinion right now is that Premiere has the goods.

Adobe is in the business of making software for creative professionals and remains committed to the pro market. That’s one reason we think that Premiere Pro might just emerge as the leading video editing application in our industry.

Summary and Conclusion

For those stepping into Premiere, HPs partnership with Adobe makes the Z800 and the ZR30w display a no-brainer. In addition, the innovative industrial design, expandability and high-quality build ensures that it will stand up to both the heaviest HD or 4K workloads and any post environment around.

An innovative American company that helped spark the creation of Silicon Valley, Hewlett Packard is the world’s pre-eminent computer manufacturer. Known for esteeming its engineers’ thinking over that of the marketing and sales teams, HP continues to invest vast sums into R&D and new factories. We like that, since it shows in the well thought out products in our review.

Your final cost, of course, will vary depending on configuration. To check out your options, visit HP’s Z800 site by clicking here.

Dan Ochiva contributed to this report.

Adobe’s Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium offers significant upgrades for creatives working on both Macs and PCs.

Next week we kick off a series of reviews for the latest version 5.5 of Adobe’s Creative Suite (CS) collection. Announced at NAB 2011, the suite has gone on sale this week.

The software suite is so significant a tool in any creative’s work that we’ll be dedicating a number of articles and reviews to the package over the coming weeks.

I’m happy to note that S.D. Katz will be offering one of his highly regarded in-depth tours of the package. Steve, an author of Shot by Shot, one of the most popular film directing books of all time, brings many years of creative inquiry to his reviews, writing with a clarity that befits a screenwriter.

With Creative Suite 5.5, Adobe moves to “regular mid-cycle releases,” which it describes as minor upgrades every other year that alternate with major upgrades at two-year intervals. This brings a bit of clarity to how to think about the CS universe, which is actually five separate collections with many moving parts. We will concentrate on Production Premium, the suite that collects apps most relevant to moving media creators.

The programs collected in Production Premium? Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5, After Effects CS5.5, Photoshop CS5 Extended, Adobe Audition CS5.5, Flash Catalyst CS5.5, Flash Professional CS5.5, Illustrator CS5, Adobe OnLocation CS5, Encore CS5, Device Central CS5.5, Bridge CS5, and Media Encoder CS5.5.

Here’s Adobe’s page on Production Premium for more specific info.

If you’d like a complete comparison of the products available in the various packages, click here.

Here’s a short video on the overall Creative Suite package.

Audition, an enhanced version of the audio processing and editing app Soundbooth from Version 5, now works on both Macs and PCs. Once again the extensive integration between apps pays off for busy users. Without the time-wasting import/export cycle, you’ll quickly move individual audio clips and multitrack mixes or complete video sequences between Premiere Pro and Adobe Audition for editing and sweetening.

Photoshop, one of the major apps in any creative’s paint set, garnered significant upgrades in its prior version, including a capability of working with video in the Extended edition. It doesn’t gain a significant makeover here. However, one nice move: Photoshop can now be accessed over a network, which potentially makes it much more relevant for use in a postproduction environment.

Flash, which brings animation, video, and interactivity to web pages and increasingly smartphones, remains the subject of a pitched battle between Adobe and Apple. Whether you agree with Apple or not on this complex question—there are plenty of good points pro and con–Adobe points out that some 131 million smartphones are expected to have Flash Player installed by the end of the year. That’s a pretty good market beyond desktops, and you’ll have the full version of Flash Pro to work with here.

OnLocation offers sophisticated logging and metadata preparation for on set and on site production. The app can even scan imported media for problems such as audio pops and clipping and off-the-chart video highlights.

While not mentioned as a separate product, you’ll also find Adobe Story screenwriting software in the package. Story actually lives mostly on the web as a CS Live online service. You can find out more about it here.

Story stores script info and other metadata in an ASTX file (Adobe Story Interchange format). When you import a script into Premiere Pro, that apps speech analysis capability improves since it can compare the script to the project’s audio files. Once the script is synced to your edit, you can search the spoken text of your clips or build a rough cut using the script to mark in and out points. Story also runs on Apple’s iOS, so scripts (including various versions and revisions) can be tracked on a mobile device.

Dual-system DSLR production gets attention too. Premiere Pro’s “Merge Clips” function allows you to sync stand-alone audio files with video clips recorded on a separate device. Using in and out points, timecode, or numbered markers as sync reference, you can sync up to 16 audio clips to a single video clip.

The speed of Premiere Pro, when married with Nvidia’s Quadro series graphics cards, makes editing RED 2K material (you can handle 4K RED files with Nvidia’s top PC-only Quadro 6000) as well as 3D into a real-time affair. Click here for an Adobe video explaining how real-time 3D editing works in Premiere.

While there are a number of useful new features in the latest version of After Effects, many at the NAB demos remarked on the ease of camera stabilization via the new Warp Stabilizer. Click here for a demo.

What’s it cost? Production Premium CS5.5 lists for $1699, with good deals on upgrades from previous versions of the suite.

For productions that can bill against rentals and not purchases, Adobe helps budgeting by introducing a subscription plan. Options include either regular monthly payments or pay as you use. For more information about Subscription Editions, click here.

There’s much more to come, so check back on a regular basis.

Adobe is on a nationwide tour with its new Creative Suite 5 Production Premium. First stop? NYC on Tuesday, May 18th.

Creative Suite (CS), if you’re not familiar, is Adobe’s ploy at making their apps all the more attractive by bundling them together and including such integration as ’round tripping’ where a change in an After Effects element, for example, is immediately updated in a Premiere Pro project.

CS5 comes in various flavors for designers (Design Premium), web heads (Web Premium), and NYCPP News readers, which means Production Premium (it includes Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop Extended–lotsa useful video capabilities there–and more.) Of course, if you have the cash (as in $2600), the Master Collection has every program that’s in each of the separate suites. (More here at Adobe’s comparison page.)

From its debut at NAB 2010, CS5 drew kudos for the capability of its full 64-bit architecture and Mercury Playback Engine, which is speedy enough to allow real-time playback of compute-intensive files from the Red camera and HDSLRs (when paired with an Nvidia Quadro FX card).

At the event, Creative Suite “video experts” will offer a free, in-depth seminar that features the new CS5 Production Premium software suite. Among the activities scheduled, you’ll see how you can work on HD and 2K projects with the “same ease as SD” via the native 64-bit support we’ve mentioned, as well as edit natively with an expanded range of tapeless and DSLR cameras without transcoding or rewrapping (causing a number of Final Cut Pro users to claim they’ll be moving to Adobe Premiere Pro).

Tuesday’s free event is at the Hotel Pennsylvania from noon on, but it might be best to sign up online first.

Okay, okay. So Jeffrey Katzenberg called Warner Bros Clash of the Titans a “cheesy” job, since the flick didn’t look as spiff as it might (the 3D was pulled out late–the film was planned only as 2D when production began–and really, Katzenberg doesn’t much like Warners right now for doing this sort of thing and clogging up screens that Dreamworks has its eyes on).

But forget the fighting. You can get some idea of what Prime Focus, a top Hollywood post facility, did to pull this off in 10 weeks by reading this on Nvidia’s site.

Prime Focus developed its own conversion pipeline–View D, which uses CUDA-powered Nvidia gear–to create the whole HD-SDI 3D post stream, enabling their artists and visual effects supervisors to pull the whole thing off in 10 weeks.

If you’ve kept track of the tech details related to Apple’s iPad announcement, it’s been pretty hard to miss Steve Job’s dismissal of Adobe Flash for the new device—he’s already made known that it has no place in the iPhone OS.

It’s not personal, of course, since so many Mac-based creatives rely on Adobe’s justly top-of-the-heap Photoshop, After Effects, et.al.

You can catch up with some of Job’s arguments in Ryan Tate’s article in Valleywag which details what happened when Jobs presented the iPad to Wall Street Journal editorial staff

Flash, as Adobe seems to constantly point out, is nearly everywhere on the Web and installed in computers as well, helping to make the Internet colorful with animation and graphics. Jobs’ anti-Flash arguments are fairly well known too: that Flash consumes too many CPU cycles, presents too many security holes, and finally is an out-dated technology—something he doesn’t want forward looking iPhone and iPad users to contend with.

But while Tate describes Jobs’ as “brazen in his dismissal of Flash”, the reasons are more complex than those most noised about. John Gruber on his Daring Firelball blog says “the larger issue goes beyond performance. Apple sees the web as a platform based on open standards. Flash isn’t part of that.”

Even if those performance issues are finally solved, Gruber argues, Apple won’t include it in the iPhone OS since, as he believes, Apple wants to control that whole OS. Apple is keeping the iPad OS closed too, something that’s not been the case with OS X (for which Jobs has blamed Flash for a great number of Mac crashes and other flaky performance issues).

To replace Flash, Jobs and Apple are pushing the interactive capabilities in HTML5, an open source standard not controllable by any one company. (HTML5 is a huge rewrite of the code that underlies the whole Web, so it will be implemented over a very long–in Web years–12 year time frame from now, even though some minor capabilities are now working with a first considerable stage planned by 2012. There’s more about this complex roll-out here.)

But on 9to5 Mac, Seth Weintraub in a blog entitled “The upcoming Apple vs. Flash battle” says that bringing tools to market to build interactive applications rivaling those now on hand for Flash/AIR are “years away at best”.

While Weintraub agrees that the first mobile devices running Flash will burn through batteries, he thinks the situation will improve quickly with more potent CPUs and GPUs coming to market. This will actually benefit Apple’s rival Android, as devices with Flash “instantly have more “applications” on them than the iPhone.”

So all is not gloomy in Adobe-land. Even of more import to anyone creating graphics and editing video, says millimeter’s Trevor Boyer, is Adobe’s upcoming release of Creative Suite 5, which will charge forward with support for 64-bit operation only (OSX 10.6 or Win7 64) while introducing the Mercury Playback Engine, a completely retooled codec wrangler.

The latter will supposedly be a game changer compared to what’s currently available as it uses a computer’s GPU (i.e. Nvidia only at this point) and CPU in parallel to deliver capabilities including real-time debayering of Red camera files (Red sells a $5k card to do that now), native Red 4K multicam editing, and Red keying; speedy AVCHD playback and scrubbing; zipping through nine layers of P2 files at a time; and accelerated rendering for exports.

Mercury is set to support Geforce GTX285, nVidia Quadro CX,FX4800, or FX580, with newer nVidia cards added to the list as they are released.

At the moment all of that quick, speedy editing comes courtesy of Adobe’s upcoming CS5 Premiere NLE only (look for it in late Spring). Photoshop and After Effects will surely have speed ups of their own going 64-bit native and supporting Nvidia’s Cuda architecture, but so far the Mercury Playback Engine looks like an Adobe exclusive.

Whether that makes it any more attractive to Avid and Final Cut Pro users doesn’t look probable, but the technology, bundled tightly within the whole CS5 suite, could prove attractive to many more potential users worldwide. It should be especially tempting to those shooting HD with DSLRs from Canon, Nikon, and others; this fast growing contingent is one Adobe will be targeting with the new suite. And why not? They’re one group already overwhelmingly tied to Photoshop as their top app.

A view of Fermi’s 3 billion+ transistors.

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.

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.