NVIDIA & Partners Transform Creative Workflow at NAB 2012

files/pictures/picture-3306.jpg

Press release from NVIDIA:

LAS VEGAS, NV — Content creators ranging from 2012 Oscar winners Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm Ltd. (Rango) and Pixomondo (Hugo) to up-and-coming independents such as Bandito Brothers (Act of Valor, Waiting for Lightning) and smaller creative services shops such as Dawnrunner Productions and Digital Spatula are increasing the speed, quality and productivity of their workflows through the adoption of GPU computing featuring NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla GPUs [1]. 

Visual effects studios, post-production houses, advertising agencies and film studios are under constant pressure to more rapidly deliver better content under tight production budgets. They use NVIDIA GPU technology to transform their content creation workflows, using parallel computing on tasks once reserved for supercomputers or racks of costly CPUs.

“GPU computing is a key component of our innovation roadmap,” said Dave Story, chief technology officer of Lucasfilm. “To achieve the breakthroughs we’re known for, we constantly evaluate the tools and technology that our artists rely on for uncompromising quality and maximum efficiency. To that end, we’re developing our own tools and using commercial software to leverage the immense power available to us through NVIDIA CUDA architecture and both NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla GPUs.”

To improve the creation process—from importing and processing high-resolution camera data through the entire post-production process—leading software providers are expanding the breadth and depth of their GPU-accelerated product offerings. One example is Adobe Systems Incorporated, which is demonstrating at NAB a landmark upcoming new release of Adobe Creative Suite 6 that uses NVIDIA GPUs [2] to accelerate Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, Adobe SpeedGrade CS6, Adobe Photoshop CS6, and, most notably, Adobe After Effects CS6, which benefits from a new 3D ray tracing feature that is up to 27 times faster on NVIDIA GPUs.

“I use After Effects every day, and 90 percent of my work is post-production with a heavy dose of motion graphics mixed with tons of video editing,” said Steve Taylor, senior creative director of Digital Spatula. “By using the new 3D ray tracing capability in After Effects, running on an NVIDIA Maximus-equipped workstation, I’m getting so much more done in less time, freeing me up to be more creative and thoughtful about the project. I’m no longer interrupted by having to switch to a second 3D application to create compelling, animated 3D text and logos. Not only is it powerfully fast, efficient and easy to use, but After Effects CS6 also gives me more time to focus on delivering higher quality productions.”

NVIDIA Maximus Technology

One reason content creators choose NVIDIA GPU technology is the immediate business value that comes from achieving both high-performance parallel processing and graphics on the same system, often in the same workflow.

NVIDIA Maximus [3] technology combines the power of NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics and NVIDIA Tesla parallel processing in a single workstation, enabling customers to, for instance, create motion graphics while rendering effects in the background – with no impact to the artist’s interactivity.

“Maximus literally saved the day for us,” said James Fox, chief executive officer of Dawnrunner Productions. “We had a client ask us for overnight changes on a job that had taken us 32 hours to render. There was no way we could pull that off. We had just gotten our Maximus system and decided the only way to meet the deadline was to put it into production right then and there. We used it to run Adobe CS5.5 and Autodesk 3ds Max and completed the job with time to spare. No way could we have done that without Maximus technology.”

At the 2012 NAB show, a number of companies are introducing support for NVIDIA Maximus technology, including Adobe, Blackmagic Design (DaVinci Resolve), Chaos Software (V-Ray RT), Cinnafilm (Dark Energy), eyeon Software (Fusion), GenArts (Sapphire) and Quantel (Pablo).

“Blackmagic Design is excited to support NVIDIA’s new Maximus configurations for Windows with DaVinci Resolve,” said Grant Petty, chief executive officer of Blackmagic Design. “By combining a single NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla GPU with Resolve, customers will be able to enjoy incredibly high performance color correction features, such as the ability to process an uncompressed RGB HD resolution video with five layers of real time color correction and image blur at 24fps. With a single Quadro and four Tesla GPUs, colorists using Resolve are able to color correct more than 20 layers of HD video in real time.” 

“We’ve seen the adoption of GPU computing more than double by software vendors in just one short year from NAB 2011 until today,” said Greg Estes, industry executive, media and entertainment for NVIDIA. “It’s pretty clear that customers across the content creation spectrum are embracing NVIDIA CUDA as the architecture of choice for GPU computing, and our software partners are seeing that they can grow their business by being on the forefront of this trend.”

NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla GPUs both feature innovative NVIDIA CUDA [4] architecture, and NVIDIA Quadro GPUs feature unique stereo 3D capabilities, support for low-latency SDI video I/O, and support for multiple displays of up to 4K resolution from a single system.