For all the scientific discoveries we’ve made in the past few decades, it’s surprising how many mysteries there are still left to solve. What’s the smallest sub-atomic particle? What are the limits of the human brain? Are there parallel universes similar to ours and if so, how do we prove it? That’s why it’s no surprise that for video editors there is still so much debate over the seemingly age-old question of which editing software is best. A quick  look at the Videomaker forums shows just how much heated debate there still is and so, I’ve decided that even though having an opinion on this topic is akin to playing with fire, I would like to still give it the ol’ college try. That being said, I am admittedly no expert on either Sony Vegas, Avid, CyberLink PowerDirector, or Corel Video Studio Pro, and so I leave the merits of those programs to both the Videomaker forum participants and any comments written below. However, it’s only fair to say that for the past 7 years, I have been a Final Cut Pro editor. All the way back in my high school days in 2003, I was using the program to make promotional videos for both my school and church. That’s not to say that I haven’t had experience with Adobe Premiere though. Since making my way to Videomaker a year ago, I have edited more than 25 promotional and educational videos using Adobe Premiere so after a year with the program I feel like I have a good perspective on the good and the bad of both platforms.That being said (and I’m sure my lawyer will be fairly relieved), here are my thoughts on the merits of both Final Cut Studio 3 and Adobe CS5. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s be honest, the first thing most of us think about when buying a new computer is the processor speed. Granted, there may be a few lone wolves whose elevator stops just shy of the top that think about the color or artistic merits of the computer first, but undoubtedly most people think of processing speed. Historically, this has indeed been the best indication of improvement to one’s computing experience and deservedly so. I mean there’s no doubt that going from 1 Ghz of processing speed to 2 should technically give your computer speeds that are close to twice as fast (which of course never actually happens), so what’s the big idea behind the title above? Let me explain. First of all, I think we can all agree that Moore’s law (which states that the amount of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on a chip will double every two years) cannot mathematically go on forever, and secondly, that the biggest gains in editing speed is no longer coming from the CPU, but from a fast hard drive and a GPU.

It’s shocking to think that Moore’s law could one day go the way of the dinosaurs. Even more shocking still is to hear a number of experts declare that CPUs are quickly approaching a power “wall” where to make the CPU any faster would mean a melting of the very substance that the transistors rest on. It doesn’t take a genius to know that a melted chip isn’t going to allow you to finish your video edit in record time. That’s why it’s unfortunate that this problem has not gotten a satisfactory answer from the labs at AMD or Intel, meaning that the “wall” may be approaching faster than we think.

On the other side of things, when Adobe announced their newest suite of creative products, CS5, they made a big deal of the close integration and speed gains that both Adobe Premiere and Media Encoder could get with a graphics card running on CUDA technology. This is because both Adobe and NVIDIA finally realized that CPUs are not only slowing their pace of improvement, but also pale in comparison to the processing power of a GPU – especially when today’s GPUs can handle the job of encoding and rendering more efficiently. If that wasn’t proof of the diminishing power of the CPU, it also seems that new versions of operating systems need less processing power and more RAM than they used to. Just a few years ago, when most people were running Windows XP, the minimum requirements for their computers to run was a measly 300 Mhz of processing power and 128 MB of RAM. Interestingly enough, when Windows finally upgraded their OS to the relative stability of Windows 7, the minimum requirements for the CPU went up by 700 Mhz, whereas the RAM went up by almost 1.8 GB, effectively double what the requirements of the CPU are. Even so, the most telling fact of all can be found with Intel’s latest announcement of their Sandy Bridge chip. Shortly after the announcement, MIT’s Technology in Review blog called into question the actual improvements of Intel’s chips saying that they “had little to tout in terms of improved CPU performance.” Instead, it seems that Intel is focusing on improved graphics processing and communication which has very little to do with what the traditional processor does. Though this may be good news for graphic card companies, it most certainly must be bad news for processor manufacturers and computer companies. If chips don’t get significantly better for tasks such as video editing or high end rendering, there will be real concern for these manufacturers as their biggest accounts will slowly fade away. Honestly, who wouldn’t just keep upgrading RAM and hard drives rather than buying a whole new CPU every 2-4 years – especially in our economy?

Hope is not lost however. Thankfully, it does appear that Intel is intent on nipping this problem in the bud by announcing new technology such as memristors and quantum computing, all of which hold promise but still have yet to see the light of day. These discoveries have the potential to allow processing speeds of up to 1 Thz. However, given the current state of the processing industry, there is good reason to doubt that these technologies will be implemented soon enough to stave off the problem. Either way, though it is a shame that processing power may not hold the same importance as it once did, the one thing that won’t be missing the slowing progress of processors is our wallets.

We have high hopes for the Adobe Flash Player 10.1, now available in beta form for Windows, Mac and Linux. The new version is shaping up to be a winner in early testing; it appears to be vastly better about memory consumption and not putting my XP-based workstation’s CPU into a race condition (aka, “becoming a runaway process”). I’ll see how well it works on a 64-bit Win7 setup in a couple of hours.

AMD and NVIDIA have also both put out press releases indicating that a number of their graphics processors will play nice with Flash 10.1, which exploits both Stream and CUDA technology (respectively), and can also eke out a bit more video performance from Intel and Broadcom’s integrated chipsets as well.

Why care? Well, you have to use Flash for pretty much any web site you go to anymore, regardless of the scope of the web site. And Flash is the most popular way to show video online these days, and it’s not too hard to see why–it makes things simple. There’s no mucking through video codecs, because all of the necessary codecs for living in Flash-land are included in the Flash installer. And the codecs in question (Sorenson Spark, On2 VP6 and VP7) are all pretty good performers. And the paranoid (but nice) copyright cartel loves it because it’s relatively easy and pretty much seamless to the end-user to apply DRM to Flash video. (You didn’t really want to download that video, did you? You did? Oopsy.)

If you want to take the 10.1 plunge, Adobe’s release notes warn you to remove your existing Flash players before installing the Flash 10.1 beta. Let us know how your experience goes.

Next: waiting patiently for the 64-bit version of Flash to hit Windows…