7 posts tagged “adobe”
I recently bought the new Canon 450D - great camera, by the way - to augment our digital camera arsenal for an upcoming wedding shoot. The general approach we take with photography is to stick with Raw mode wherever possible as it gives us a bit more flexibility in the adjustment stage, particularly around the white balance, without as much damage to the image compared to using Jpeg.
The Raw image format is specific to each particular model of camera due to the nature of the image CCD layout, camera settings, etc. Photoshop eases the support for Raw by using a plug-in. Adobe keep updating the Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in with the details of the latest and greatest cameras:
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html
They added support for the EOS 450D to Camera Raw 4, specifically version 4.4.
So where is the built-in obsolescence?
Camera Raw 4 is only supported by Photoshop CS3 or Photoshop Lightroom. It is not compartible with Photoshop CS2, which is the version I have, and Adobe do not add camera support to older versions of the Camera Raw plug-in.
So I now have a choice:
- Use Jpeg instead of RAW format when taking photos.
- Use Canon's Digital Photo Professional tool, supplied with the camera, to convert the RAW images into Jpeg.
- Spend £700 upgrading my CS2 suite to CS3.
Hmmm ... some choice!
Dave Helmly at Adobe has written a great article about the workflow and experience of using the latest (yet to be released) versions of the video tools from Adobe to take HDV footage and create a Blu-ray disc.
http://blogs.adobe.com/davtechtable/2007/05/working_with_encore_cs3_and_bl.html
It is very encouraging to see that the new software applications are going to make more use of multiple cores. The blog also gives an insight as to why only Blu-ray is currently supported. One can only hope that either the format war ends soon or more HD DVD burners become available and Encore is extended to support HD DVD as well.
Dave Helmly at Adobe has written a great article about the workflow and experience of using the latest (yet to be released) versions of the video tools from Adobe to take HDV footage and create a Blu-ray disc.
http://blogs.adobe.com/davtechtable/2007/05/working_with_encore_cs3_and_bl.html
It is very encouraging to see that the new software applications are going to make more use of multiple cores. The blog also gives an insight as to why only Blu-ray is currently supported. One can only hope that either the format war ends soon or more HD DVD burners become available and Encore is extended to support HD DVD as well.
It looks as if the CS3 release of After Effects may go some way to justifying my investment in a dual-processor, quad-core system.
According to Bob Donlon's blog, AE CS3 support rendering of multiple frames simultaneously through the use of multiple processors and cores. It does this by creating multiple background processes to perform the rendering, so it can be a bit hungry on memory (512MB per process).
Looks like I may need to (a) change to a 64-bit operating system and (b) increase the 4GB memory! Well, probably note - I don't actually use AE that much, but I do want to, and this new feature will at least give me finished results faster.
Looking at some of the details that Adobe have made available about the CS3 release, I'm quite excited about some of the features:
- Generate slow motion and other time-remapping effects.
This probably isn't something I'll use personally but I know that a lot of people have been asking for it. Yes, it is available in AE, but that just means putting the footage into AE, rendering it and then putting it back into PPro. By embedding the functionality into PPro, you avoid those steps. Neat. - DVD and Blu-ray output, including automatic conversion from a Blu-ray project to a standard-definition DVD.
Does this mean that Adobe have decided who is going to win the format war? I wonder how good the automatic conversion will be? If it works properly, this could be a fantastic feature to have. My sister's wedding video was done all in HDV and then rendered out to SD. I've kept all of the source files in case I want to re-master it, but this would be a whole different ball game. - Direct-to-disk recording.
I've been a fan of direct-to-disk recording for a while, having owned a Firestore unit, but since I've got two camcorders and only one Firestore, my usage of it has been a bit limited. With OnLocation being included now, I could see me using a laptop for one camcorder and the Firestore for a second unit and making the whole process a lot smoother.
I've also just noticed that the Production Premium suite for Windows includes Ultra CS3. I've been interested in their virtual set technology for a while but never invested in the blue/green screen equipment needed. This may be a good reason for doing it now.
When I first started doing computer-based video editing, I used Premiere 6 with a Matrox acceleration card, the RT2000. Adobe sometimes like to add some third-party bits of software and Premiere 6 came with SmartSound's QuickTrack add-on.
This software is an interesting experience - you get a library of tracks and you can change the mood of a piece of music as well as the duration. They've encoded their tracks so that they can pull out different bits to achieve those results. So, for example, you'll have a track called American Sunrise with variations called Dawn, New Day, Remember, Liberty, Choice, Symbols and Daybreak. When you enter a time, it adjusts the time to the nearest it can accommodate with the track you've selected and it sounds like a seamless piece.
So it was a shame when QuickTracks got dropped from the Premiere package in later editions, and the version that came with Premiere 6 wouldn't run - you had to spend $100 to buy a new copy if you wanted it.
The good news is that SmartSound are now making the software available for free! A quick registration and you'll be able to download the software with 10 tracks. SmartSound sell additional libraries to expand your collection.
Sweet!
For typical uses, e.g. word processing, email, web browsing, a typical specification computer can be used.
For non-typical uses like playing games and video editing, you often can't get away with a typical specification. The trouble is that it can be difficult trying to figure out what specification you do want in order to get the most from your system. Reviews go some way but since there can be an amazing number of permuatations of hardware bits and pieces, it can be difficult to compare apples and oranges.
WGehrke has created an automated tool for generating some benchmark results for Premiere Pro. The tool performs three tasks: rendering of the benchmark's project timeline, exporting that timeline to a single AVI file and encoding it to a DVD MPEG file.
I decided to run the test twice on my new computer. The first run would be with just Premiere Pro. Here are the timings:
- Rendering: 248 seconds
- AVI export: 42 seconds
- MPEG export: 52 seconds
I then re-ran the test, this time using the Matrox RT.X2 hardware to accelerate the processes. Here are the timings from that run:
- Rendering: 166 seconds
- AVI export: 33 seconds
- MPEG export: 106 seconds
It should be understood that a lot of the benchmark uses native Premiere code, particularly the MPEG export. I'm not sure why it took so much longer on the second run; I didn't run the test again to see if it was consistenly slower. It is worth knowing that there is an additional mechanism for exporting MPEGs using the RT.X2 hardware acceleration and that should be a realtime process. I didn't take that route, though, because the compression settings would have been slightly different.
So how does this system compare with other results?
For the rendering test, the native run is slower than the first three submitted results, which are a 2.66GHz Quad Core, a 2.66GHz Dual Core and a 2.93GHz Dual Core. I'm not particularly surprised about that. This is a processor-intensive operation and is likely to be single-threaded so even though I've got 8 cores, they are clocked at 2.33GHz, which is slower than all of the others. When the Matrox RT.X2 acceleration kicks in, the run is the fastest of all results.
For the AVI export, 42 seconds is about middle of the road for all of the submissions while 33 seconds is 2nd fastest time. I hadn't expected the RT.X2 to have played a part here. The AVI export should be a disk intensive operation. My system has got 7200rpm SATA drives (the Barracuda 750Gb drives) while the other contributors have largely used 10,000rpm drives.
Finally, the MPEG export. 52 seconds is again about middle of the road, while 106 seconds is really bad - I need to re-run the test to see if it is consistent. If it is, I'll report it to Matrox for their investigation. This test is another processor intensive test so I'm not surprised at the 52 seconds.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with the results. The RT.X2 clearly makes a difference - and largely a beneficial one. The choice of the harddrives was largely driven by a capacity desire and I wasn't overly concerned by the difference between 7,200rpm and 10,000rpm.
The choice of going for 2 Quad core processors may seem a bit strange, particularly given that a higher speed Dual core processor is more effective. However, this system was bought with the long term in mind. Multi-core systems really only came to the forefront during 2006 so not much software takes advantage of them. I expect that to change during the lifetime of my system.
