Greetings from Los Angeles, where the inaugural west coast DAM show kicked of yesterday at the Hilton Universal. This is the first time Elemental has participated in a conference like this. Now, why would we exhibit at a niche event more related to storage than encoding? Actually, this is an extremely interesting event for Elemental. Here’s why.

Digital asset management (DAM), in a sentence, is the capture, management and enabling of rich content. Rich content comprises video types, still imagery and compound documents, such as PowerPoint. Video types are now the largest segment of rich content under management today.

A major component of DAM is how a user processes video assets for distribution to multiple devices, and manages and tracks these assets no matter where they may end up.

Createasphere, started as HD Expo in 2001, is the organization that puts on the DAM shows (there will also be one in New York in September). The Createasphere team has done a great job and attendance has surpassed expectations. I think this is indicative of the growing need to manage digital assets, including the distribution and management of video content. This is where Elemental fits into what I refer to as the video supply chain.

It's been a long, but worthwhile, wait since the last Olympic Winter Games.
I think this year is especially exciting due to how far we've come technologically in just the last four years, let alone since I was a kid.

I remember bending rabbit ears on my 7" TV, picking up a fuzzy CTV Broadcast of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.  Being a young hockey player and skier, I was addicted to the Winter Olympics from that moment on, and I've watched every Olympics since. 

The evolution of media delivery and consumption over that period is really remarkable, and the Vancouver games will bring more options than ever for tuning in. In the US, NBC has gone to an all-HD production for the first time.  They will be broadcasting 835 hours of content on their network.  In addition, they will be live streaming about half of that over the Internet, and providing video-on-demand replays of over 1,000 hours of events. NBC is teaming up with Microsoft to present the online streams using Smooth Streaming technology and Silverlight players, which presents an amazing step forward in video quality.

Today, Elemental announced the release of Elemental Accelerator 2.2 for Mac, a major update to its GPU-accelerated video processing plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4. With release 2.2, Elemental Accelerator provides CS4 users on the Mac significantly faster transcode speeds through support for GPU-accelerated H.264 and MPEG-2 video decoding, processing and encoding. This release offers the same easy integration with Adobe Premiere® Pro® CS4 as Elemental Accelerator for Windows, while offering 2X-4X performance improvements and time savings over CPU-only encoding solutions.

What's new?

New features available in this release include:

Recently, I was interviewed by the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) for a member spotlight and it got me thinking about how important shared resources are to new ventures. Elemental’s co-founders and I know firsthand how challenging it is to turn an idea for a business into a legitimate company -- not to mention delivering on the commitment of a high ROI for our stakeholders.

Luckily, Portland has some great resources for new firms. Along with the OEN, the Software Association of Oregon has networking events and valuable services for member companies. Then there are other local startups that have built impressive businesses, including Jive Software, Tripwire, and Kryptiq. Many of the executives at these success stories are active in the community and always willing to share their stories and experiences with new companies. 

In the hopes that Elemental has something to contribute to the dialog, I thought it would be worthwhile to jot down the places I've gone for advice, wisdom, and inspiration. Perhaps these resources will be useful for others. 

Blogs 

It's that time of year when we dust off our pile of good intentions and decide how this year will be radically different and dramatically more productive! Well, according to one video editor in Virginia, those don't have to be hyperbolic statements if you follow five easy steps to boost your system. With some essential upgrades to your hardware (and software), you can actually see some of the drama everyone is talking about with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, such as video encoding that takes two hours instead of ten and ensures you can actually meet the rush deadline that just came up.

Won Novalis' article, "Essential Ugrades to Boost Your System," for the After Effects user site ae.tutsplus.com presents an incredibly useful upgrade guide to start the year off right. Won breaks it down into five steps complete with supporting graphics and videos, including:

   1. Get a Bigger Desk (Memory)

   2. Get Lighting That's Easy on the Eyes (Monitor)

   3. Hire a Video Specialist With Her Own Office (Video Card)

   4. Get More Storage Space (Hard drives)

   5. Get a Presentation Room to Review Your Work (I/O Card)