Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

VPlay from Microsoft Research Labs is one of the many developments surrounding Project Tuva (a player built on Silverlight technoilogy). I’m following the development of this project with great passion.

http://www.adobe.com/choice/

In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? And we believe the answer is: nobody — and everybody, but certainly not a single company.

Chuck Geschke, John Warnock

Premiere Pro CS5

Steve Jobs posted this letter in regards to the problems Adobe is struggling with in regards to Flash. I think – however – that Jobs has got quite a few things wrong in his letter and I think there’s more than “tech” behind a lot of his arguments.

Just to make a few things clear. Flash is resource hungry. No doubt about it. It does not run good on computers with specs equivalent to a personal computer from 1993 (most mobile phones). It’s not rocket science. Adobe needs to work on off loading video playback on the GPU.

These are my reflections on what he wrote:

First, there’s “Open”.

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe.

So let’s just ignore successful and innovative products like Xara (different products), Swift 3D, Toon Boom (market leader – host of products), Carrara Pro and many others. Apple is in fact one of the RIA competitors to Flash with it’s own proprietary QT. QT is as closed as Flash if not more so.

Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards.

Yeah? http://www.quicktime.com Open Standards? HTML5 is completely prepared for RIA’s like Silverlight, Java and Flash. No conflict there whatsoever.

By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

Yes. Apple is trying to make the web mobile device centric. Is that a good thing? I’m not so sure. I understand Apple want’s to sell phones but I’m convinced the web has potentials beyond miniature screens and low end processing power.

Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

This is the first time I’ve heard the security argument coming from a Mac guy. Think about it. These few lines are historical. This will probably increase Symantecs OSX clients from zero to infinity and beyond. Steve Jobs just stated that Macs needs Symantec. Mindboggling.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Or you could just redesign it in Flash to fit your purposes. But, sure. It may not yet run on slow mobile Phones from Apple. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zneA0ts-hnA

Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Yes. Many websites may have to be rewritten to run on slow hardware. It’s like reverse Star Trek.

We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

Yes. It’s a shame Apples gadgets are to slow for AIR apps. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwFbwHaP5tE

And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

I’m not speaking for Adobe – but Apple made the bed when they decided it was an excellent idea to start competing with the biggest developer of creative video tools for the Mac ten years ago with the Final Cut Studio package. Premiere Pro 1.0 wasn’t even available on OSX at first for that reason. Apple never did manage to release a “Photoshop killer” so I would expect that’s why Adobe is still in supporting OSX.

Conclusions.

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

I know Apple sells a lot of phones. I couldn’t care less actually. I like to browse the web on my 30″ monitor. It’s actually quite sad that Apple has become a phone company.

A couple of month ago I was invited to London by Adobe to have a sneak peek at CS5. I must say a lot of it looks brilliant. Have a look at some of it at Adobes CS5 launch site. After Effects has a few added features that could have some profound industry changing effect. Premiere Pro will make you forget a lot of the issues with the last version. It’s time to trust Premiere Pro as one of the most powerful video editing tools out there.

Make sure to try out the new Flash Player 10.1. H.264 is now supposed to have full hardware acceleration – not just GPU off load in scaling to full screen. Finally.

…speaking of Machinima. I was hired to do a sample project for Moviestorm in Cambridge a couple of years ago when they we’re just starting out. I think they are progressing along nicely. You can download Moviestorm from their site. Modding is still a bit of a hassle and I don’t know how far they have developed imports of motion capture files (something I was really eager for them to do). I’ll keep watching them and I’m using Moviestorm as a previz tool on some of the things I’m working on. Another note is that they should clean up the interface design a bit.

 

I thing Machinima software should be developed to support 3rd party rendering engines – so that you can buy a powerful renderer and ad it to your workflow if you need it. I’m not a programmer so I don’t know how difficult that would be but a lot of 2D packages works that way.

I believe we’re all going to be making our films on or GPU:s in real time in the near future. The “old world” have a bit of a problem adjusting to this. A lot of the large software houses are adding GPU acceleration to the CPU work flow – but that will always be an “add on” until everything is written from the ground up for complete GPU computing.

 

I found this software the other day. It’s from Refractive Software and what it does is give you real time photo real rendering. Something that takes for ever on a CPU. The extreme high quality stuff takes a few minutes – but it’s far from what you’d expect from most other packages with that image output quality.

 

I’m still waiting for the first Machina animation package to utilize a higher end modern GPU engine like CUDA. Most of what’s out there uses the old game engines like Quake. The technology is here. Now it’s up to a creative and innovative company to utilize it for profit and benefit creative’s all over the world.

Have a look in the gallery and check out the video clips.

 

This piece of Japanese software is in it’s infancy – but this is amazing. I’ve downloaded and played around with the 60 day trial (watermarked) and the way this software uses CUDA is just amazing. Finally an NLE completely built around the GPU. And I really like the design paradigm. It’s fluid, intuitive and extremely fast. This type of software challanges the paradigm. I only wish they would ad a version with pro features that had export functionality like XML, AAF, OMF and so on. Even simple EDL’s (CMX will never go out of style).

 

And the funny thing about this is that LoiLoScope actually reminded me of the original concepts of Non Linear Editing using computers – the CMX 600. I’ve always thought we screwed up that original concept with the Avid paradigm – after all trying to emulate tape to tape linear editing. The CMX had a pen controlled surface (two CRT’s). Now touch is back big time and LoiLoScope is pretty much built around that.