Videomaker’s Webinar Training series continues next week with an all new topic: The Art of Title and Graphics. Our live webinars are taught by our experts and feature a wide spectrum of video production and post production topics such as Green Screen and Special Effects, Advanced Editing, Advanced Shooting, and Documentary Production. Next week, Videomaker’s team is pleased to present The Art of Title and Graphics.

Great titles and graphics can add a professional element to your video production. However, if not done properly they can be the tell-tale sign of an amateur.Videomaker’s The Art of Titles and Graphics webinar will cover purpose, design and placement, as well as mistakes to avoid. You will learn how to create great-looking titles and graphics that are clean and professional.

In addition to valuable information, our The Art of Title and Graphics Webinar will also include a live Q&A segment; our team answering your questions. Next week’s The Art of Title and Graphics Webinar starts at 11:00am on Wednesday, September 15th, so be sure to sign up soon!

Ever heard the saying “slow and steady wins the race?” While it’s great advice for those who are running marathons, it is just the opposite of the ideal experience for a motion graphic designer. When an artist is in that long sought creative “zone” of graphic design having to wait 5 or more seconds for an image to refresh can make the magic wear off in a hurry. I mean, would Picasso be a happy customer if every paint stroke took 5 seconds to show up on his canvas? I doubt it. For this very reason, it can be of utmost importance to know some tips on how to keep your program running smoothly during the entirety of your production.

After spending several years working with Adobe After Effects, I feel pretty confident in saying that the basic reasons for why the program can sometimes slow to a crawl will inevitably fall into one of three categories: hardware, software, and work flow. That being said, the best way to speed up After Effects is of course, a hardware upgrade. However, hardware upgrades can be incredibly expensive – not to mention time consuming. Instead, it can be a good idea to just upgrade the most important parts of your computer that give After Effects its speed. Let me be clear: a faster processor is always going to give you the biggest bump in speed but there are other pieces of hardware that can do a lot for your computer as well. Also, it is always best to have the newest version of Adobe’s software as each new update tends to give faster render times due to increased support of GPUs and more efficient coding. That being said, if you want longer previews in After Effects, you will want to buy more RAM. After Effects versions from CS4 and below can only recognize 4 gigabytes of RAM unless multiple copies of After Effects’ renderer are open using multiprocessing, so try and get at least 6 to 8 gigabytes of RAM in order to max out your RAM in After Effects and have a little left over for other applications that need to be open. Thankfully RAM prices are as good as they’ve ever been making it possible to buy 8 gigabytes of DDR3 1600 megahertz RAM package for only $175.00. Another piece of hardware that can really help you speed up After Effects is a couple of fast hard drives. By putting your footage to one fast HDD that your computer can read from while writing rendered files to another fast hard drive you will notice a faster playback and render time. If you have some money to burn, your best option will be to buy two solid state drives that attach to your computer’s PCI-e slots giving you potential read times of 80-260 megabytes per second and write times of 60-160 megabytes per second. If you don’t have cash like that to burn, them some high end 7,200 RPM hard disk drives should still speed up your After Effects compositing. With the introduction of After Effects CS5 and its Mercury Playback engine,  it’s now possible to get significantly faster render times by upgrading the GPU of your computer. It accelerates rendering, encoding, and opening of large projects. One of the best graphics cards you can get at this time is the NVIDIA Quadro 6000 or an ATI Sapphire Radeon HD 5970.

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In this article, we look at the benefits of 2, 4 and 8 core CPU’s. When does an 8 core really make a difference over a 4 or 2 core unit and is there any real benefit to the extra cost?

Background

All new desktops and workstations today have CPU’s with multiple processors or cores on them. This is a relatively new phenomenon which Intel introduced in the second quarter of 2005. Up to that time Intel’s CPU’s all had one processor and were based on an architecture called Netburst that had been around since the early ’90’s. Intel’s original intention was to take Netburst all the way up to 10GHz. By the time the company had reached 3.73GHz however, the amount of heat that the CPU was generating was so great that there was no adequate way of cooling a 4 GHz CPU that Intel was developing without resorting to radical methods like water cooling. The joke making the rounds at that time was Intel had diversified into making space heaters that occasionally doubled up as processors. Intel had dabbled with new computer case designs in an effort to aid cooling, but this effort was for the most part rejected by case manufacturers. They resented having to spend millions of dollars in retooling simply because Intel couldn’t get its heat issues under control. More pressing was arch rival AMD’s introduction to the market of CPU’s that were proving to be faster yet cooler than Intel’s offerings. This was a shock to Intel. The company had been dominant in the CPU market since the late ‘80’s yet its products were now being outperformed by a much smaller upstart with nowhere near the resources that Intel had.

Intel’s response was the Pentium D line of CPU’s. This was a crude product with basically two single core processors on a single piece of silicon. In truth, this was only a partial solution. The vast majority of applications at that time did not take advantage of multiple processors and since it was based on the same Netburst architecture, there was still the same heat issue to contend with.

Finally in the summer of 2006, Intel introduced the “Core” architecture, the company’s first new CPU architecture in over a decade. The Core architecture was 30-70% faster than previous generation CPU’s yet ran significantly cooler. The new architecture had been developed in Israel and was based on a design that was originally destined only for laptop CPU’s. This new design however was fast with such low energy requirements and heat output that it was modified for the desktop market. The resulting Core architecture was a resounding success, with CPU’s that were significantly faster than products from AMD. Intel quickly regained lost market share and since then, the company has never looked back. Intel has resorted to a two year development cycle for its CPU’s. Minor tweaks are made to the CPU architecture after the first year and a complete revision takes place after the second. In fact, the shock that Intel got from AMD in the first half of this decade has generated an atmosphere of real innovation within the company. They are now cranking out CPU’s, which are fast highly energy efficient processors. No other company in the world comes close either in terms of speed or efficiency.

In keeping with its two year timetable, Intel introduced a completely new architecture in November 2008 and named it Nehalem which again has made significant strides over the previous Core architecture.

The Contenders

In this review we examine how four different CPU’s fare when attempting to transcode “The Battle of Britain” from MPEG-2 to QuickTime. We use a highly popular application called handbrake to do this. We use handbrake because it uses all the physical cores available in a CPU. It is highly popular with users who want to watch their DVD’s on an iPod.

The four CPU’s we are testing are:

1. AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+. This CPU was introduced on May 31, 2005. This CPU was beloved by computer enthusiasts everywhere and was instrumental in destroying Intel market share and causing a real shake up at Intel. In benchmark after benchmark, AMD’s CPU’s wiped the floor with Intel’s offerings until Intel introduced a new architecture in mid 2006. At the time, it sold for around $700. We include it here to show just how far CPU’s have come in the last three or four years.
2. Intel Celeron E1500: Celeron is Intel’s brand name for its budget CPU’s. They are usually identical CPU’s to their mainstream brethren, except that some of the CPU memory or cache is disabled. The E1500 is a dual core CPU running at 2.2GHz and is based on the Core architecture.
3. Intel i7 920: This is a quad core CPU running at 2.66GHz with exactly the same architecture as the E5520 except that it can’t run in tandem with another CPU as the E5520 can.
4. 2 x Xeon E5520: The Xeon E5520 is a quad core 2.4GHz CPU based on the Nehalem architecture. We use two of them in an 8 core workstation.

Each CPU is tested with 4GB of RAM on Windows XP Pro.

The Results

The Conclusions

• The most obvious conclusion here is that in video rendering and transcoding, more cores are better. CPU’s 3 & 4 are quad and 8 core machines respectively. CPU’s 1 & 2 are dual core. The quad and 8 core machines are four times faster at completing the same task.
• CPU 1 has a frequency that is 10% slower than CPU 2, but since CPU 1 has 8 cores as opposed to the four of CPU 2, it is able to complete the same task 15% quicker. In other words when comparing CPU’s with the same architecture: More cores at a slower frequency are more efficient at transcoding than fewer cores at a higher frequency. This is one reason that I advise customers that plan to do a lot of video rendering and transcoding with their new workstation that it is better to choose a slower 8 core than a faster 4 core computer.
• As stated above, CPU 2, the AMD processor that was beloved by gamers and multimedia power users and cost $700 in 2006 is barely faster than today’s Celerons which retail at less than $50. This is one indication of just how far processors have come in the last three years. If you are struggling to edit video or photographs with a computer that you bought before June 2006, you now know that all the marketing is not just hype! You do have an option.

Unfortunately, as implied above, not all applications make efficient use of all the cores in a CPU. Multiple CPU cores represent a significant paradigm shift in software programming because in order to make efficient use of all cores, the CPU has to be able to process instructions in parallel as opposed to sequentially as was the case with single core CPU’s. For example, games such as Crysis rarely make use of more than 2 cores. This is why companies that specialize in gaming computers don’t usually sell 8 core workstations – there is no performance gain so it is difficult to justify the extra cost.

As shown above however, photo and especially video editing take significant advantage of 4 and 8 core CPU’s. This is worth noting if you are a photographer or a videographer who has to work to deadlines – multiple core CPU’s will significantly improve your productivity. Finally, more cores mean better multi-tasking – the ability to run several programs simultaneously. This is especially true of the Windows 7 operating system which has been specifically developed to take advantage of CPU’s with multiple cores.

Choosing the right CPU for Digital Content Producers.

________

Regis Mencer is principal of Cerise Computers, a custom computer company dedicated to helping video editors choose the best hardware for their software needs.

Throughout the decades, Lewis Carrol’s novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, has been a staple for movie and television adaptations. The most recent adaptation comes from the vivid imagination of Tim Burton.

Shot almost entirely in front of a green screen, and comprised of thousands of digital effects, the movie incorporates live action, animation and 3-D effects in hopes of pulling the audience into Alice’s world of wonder. As interesting as the final product looks, peaking behind the curtain allows us to learn techniques that can be applied to our own special effects adventures. Here are some fun facts from behind the scenes:

– Since a lot of the characters were created digitally, the crew used cardboard cut outs, full-size models, and people donned in green with eyes stuck to various parts of their bodies. This gave the actors something to react to, as well as providing a guide for eyelines.

– Hours of green screen exposure caused the cast and crew to experience green screen induced sickness and fatigue. It became such an issue that Tim Burton had a special pair of lavender tinted glasses crafted to combat the sickening effect of the green screen.

– For filming the Red Queen’s (Helena Bonham Carter) ridiculously large head, the crew used a Dalsa 4k hi-def camera. The camera’s 4,000 lines of resolution allowed Carter’s head to be enlarged in post production without losing image quality.

– The movie’s producer, Richard Zanuck, and director, Tim Burton, decided it would be best to shoot in 2D and then transfer the film to 3D. This saved them from excessive production costs and the hassle of working with 3D cameras. It was decided that, in the end, “you can’t tell the difference.”

Time will tell whether the movie will successfully capture the imagination of movie-goers. However, regardless of box office success or failure, there is always something that can be learned from our fellow movie makers. The film premieres today in London, and will hit theaters March 5, 2010.

It only took $300…

And Fede Alvarez landed himself a Hollywood movie deal, a viral video, and $30 million. Talk about inspiration, nothing can be more inspiring than Fede’s road to success. A commercial director from Uruguay, Alvarez caught the eye of esteemed film maker Sam Raimi. Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures has agreed to develop and direct Alvarez’s original science fiction style project. Drawing comparisons to District 9, Alvarez’s movie entitled “Ataque de Panico!” (Panic Attack) has created a buzz amongst the YouTube crowd already reaching over 1.5 million views. After becoming viral in such a short span of time Alvarez claims his email was full from directors and Hollywood types trying to nab his film. The video itself uses the heart pulsing soundtrack from 28 Days Later to build up its anticipation of the large invasion brewing and is a nice combination of influences. This just goes to show you, sometimes it just boils down to talent! Now watch the video for yourself, and be sure to tell us what you think!

Reprinted from a Boris FX  press release

BCC 6 AVX for DS brings nearly 180 filters to 64-bit versions of Avid DS. The release features over 30 new filters including Pixel Fixer, DV Fixer, and Smooth Tone tools; Swish Pan, Cartoon Look, Pencil Sketch, and Water Color effects; and OpenGL-accelerated effects such as 3D Extruded Image Shatter, Damaged TV, Glint, Glare, Glitter, LED, Lens Flare, Lightning, and Scanline.

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