Category: Item of Interest

Enable CUDA for Adobe Mercury Engine on unsupported cards? http://bit.ly/92VapW

The fact that Adobe has made this as easy as it is – by simply editing an entry in a text file – suggests they don’t really oppose users doing this on unsupported cards. It’s my understanding that Adobe have supported a relatively small number of CUDA-capable cards so they could be thoroughly tested and to have fewer variables during development. Not sure how you do this on a Mac though.

Remember this is UNSUPPORTED. You are on your own with problems! And you can’t go blaming Adobe for any crashing or other problems on an unsupported configuration. But you can test, and if there are problems, just reverse the change to the text file.

Sony EX3 3D stereoscopy camera revealed? http://bit.ly/dsmWzy Why didn’t Sony preview this at NAB? Double lens configs for “thre rest” 3D?

Looks like the Panasonic 3D camera with dual lens configuration. Is this the way for “democratized” 3D production – dual lenses that make configuration that much easier?

Looks like Jobs was right. H.264 already makes up 66% of web video http://tcrn.ch/cHD2jI (including H.264 played via Flash players)

In his slam on Flash, Steve Jobs argued that most video on the web was already in an iDevice-ready format: H.264. Well, encoding.com’s figures show that, in the last year, FLV and H.264 video have changed position: H.264 up from 31% a year ago to 66% now. FLV & VP6 (Flash 7 onward) combined moved from 69% down to a combined 26% now.

It’s important to note that since Flash 9r3 (Nov 2007) Flash has been able to play MP4 H.264 video – the same as is played on the Apple portable devices: Flash is not required to view these videos.

When Adobe announced H.264 support in Flash I wrote this for the Digital Production BuZZ news feed:

This is a seriously good development in web delivery and establishes H.264/AAC in an MPEG-4 (mp4/m4v) wrapper as the dominant web format. Gone is the need to encode separate versions for Flash and MPEG-4. Now you you can load and play .mp4, .m4v, .m4a, .mov (limited support) and .3gp files into a Flash player using the same API used to load FLV files now. The same files will now play in Flash, QuickTime Player, iPod, Apple TV and many other players.

And so it has come to pass!

TV Ditches Paper Scripts for iPad, Saves $2,000 a Month http://bit.ly/b6Hc1d Reporters use the iPad to write and read scripts.

A TV station in Albany, Georgia is saving US$2,000 per month in printing costs by using iPads for writing and reading scripts. The station, WFXL, is one of 15 stations owned by Barrington Broadcasting, and it made the switch to both save money and reduce the company’s carbon footprint.

According to an article by Poynter Online, the station e-mails new and edited scripts to individual e-mail accounts set up for each iPad. Each iPad is also set up with a $6.99 iPad app called iAnnotate PDF — a PDF reader and annotation tool — for using the scripts in live and recorded situations.

Steve Jobs betting the company or the future of computing. http://bit.ly/aFHlOT

Charles Stross has a very interesting take on Apple, Flash etc: it’s not just about keeping Flash off, it’s about the future of computing and how Apple are trying to build the mobile web – the future of computing according to Stross – in just five years. Plus more on changing PC business models.

Overall, an excellent, thought provoking article.

I’ve got a theory, and it’s this: Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here’s why …

RT @dougluberts: From @engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/30/microsoft-weighs-in-the-future-of-the-web-is-html5/

From Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for Internet Explorer:

Echoing the Apple CEO’s words, Hachamovitch describes HTML5 as “the future of the web,” praising it for allowing content to be played without the need for plug-ins and with native hardware acceleration (in both Windows 7 and Mac OS X). He goes on to identify H.264 as the best video codec for the job — so much so that it’ll be the only one supported in IE9’s HTML5 implementation — before turning to the dreaded subject of Flash.

Adobe are quick supporting the hardware h.264 acceleration in Flash Gala release http://bit.ly/aixK6s API only publicly documented last week.

On April 22nd, Apple published a tech note on some new H.264 decoding APIs and today Adobe announce that a beta version of Flash Player for OS X – the “Gala” version, calls those hardware APIs for decoding H.264 Flash. (Most “Flash Video” is h.264/MPEG-4 just like the video used for HTML5 and Apple devices, just that Flash is the player.)

That’s really walking the walk on Adobe’s part. Flash on OS X will likely suck less if you have one of the appropriate cards with H.264 hardware decoding on board.

Conrary opinon to CoC http://bit.ly/c46A29 Fair Use (loose IP laws) grows Trillions of $$ in US alone Somewhere btwn 2 istudies s fact

Two studies, same day, and yet this study shows that Trillions of $$ in the US alone are because of the Fair Use provisions of the Copyright legislation.  Few studies ever consider the upside of loose IP law because most studies are intended to support the (unsubstantiated to date) assertions from the RIAA, MPAA and their cousins on how much harm they’re suffering. Except their industries are not suffering, just their obsolete business models.

This report also acknowledges how hard it is to get really accurate figures on any of this, something the pro tighter copyright (pay us for every listen or view) tend not to do, wanting us to believe their rubbery, fudgy figures are in some way connected to reality.

Change in business models is inevitable. Just as lamplighters, linytype operators and buggy whip manufacturers.

[Update] I love the way Boing Boing puts this:

The “fair use economy” is enormous, growing, and endangered by the relatively tiny entertainment industry

The report is a counterpoint to those crazy Hollywood stats that show that every job in America will disappear unless copyright is extended to infinity, all network connections are surveilled, and every infringer is fined her entire net worth and stuck in jail.

Chamber of Commerce posts bogus IP study as if it was researched http://bit.ly/d3MrWw

How do we expose these charletans? Do they think that no-one will examine what the study actually considered and what factual conclusion could reasonably be made, instead of the insane headline, which is antithetical to any known real research. (Even the US Government Accounting Office comes up with research that suggests “piracy” is a net good for the enterntainment industry.)

Of course, they get away with this type of behavior because the “media” (newspapers and television) do not actually read the research. They grab the headline and press release and publish it as if they had done some work.

The US Chamber of Commerce (which many people mistakenly think is a government organization — it’s not) has a long history ofgetting the facts wrong about intellectual property. The folks at the Chamber of Commerce have one basic mission, which is to protect the big businesses that fund it. And what better way to do that then to have the government help give them monopoly rights and then enforce those rights. The latest is that it has released a report which it falsely claims proves that stricter IP enforcement would boost the economy. But that’s not what the report actually says. The Chamber of Commerce hired NPD Group to write this report, and you can read the results yourself (pdf). It’s significantly weaker than even the most ridiculous studies we’ve seen in the past.

Preview of my free seminar on Branding your post production business now up. http://bit.ly/bqmVfd

The preview covers the topic of “what business are you really in” and what you should be projecting to your clients right now. The entire free seminar is next Tuesday, May 4th and will cover:

• Know what business you are you really in?
• Building your Brand
• Why doubling your prices may be smarter than reducing them to the levels of your competitors.
• Marketing, PR and Social Conversations
• Network in the physical and virtual worlds
• Maximize your visibility on the Internet

Did I mention it was free to sign up and attend, and three people will win a copy of my book The New Now.