Elemental Accelerator Product Review

2010-02-18 - Jason Lewis of CG Channel reviews impressive performance of Elemental Accelerator 2.2 with various HP systems and Nvidia graphics cards. According to Lewis, "so you can see by the benchmarks, that Elemental's claims do hold true as we can see a roughly 60% – 90% performance increase using the FX3800, 4800, and 5800 over CPU encoding on the mighty Z800 and Z600 workstations with their 8 cores of Nehalem CPUs."

1000 Friends of Oregon honors 35 young people for nature, food and land-use work

2010-02-18 - The Oregonian's Eric Mortenson reports on 1000 Friends of Oregon's 35th anniversary celebration and award to "35 innovators under 35," including CEO Sam Blackman for his work with the Oregon League of Conservation Voters.

OEN Member Spotlight - Sam Blackman of Elemental Technologies

2010-01-12 - Oregon Entrepreneurs Network profiles Elemental CEO Sam Blackman's perspective on real world challenges of creating and sustaining a vital startup, like learning to differentiate between urgent and important tasks. His insights include, "the company will fail unless you have a strong team of people who love working for you."

Industry Perspectives: Building a Smarter Server

2010-01-5 - CEO Sam Blackman contributes his perspective to Streaming Media about the future of streaming video servers and the need for a "smarter server." According to Sam, "as more companies work to solve these challenges, the faster we will evolve the intelligent servers that can satiate the global demand for online and mobile media."

Predictions for mobile TV in 2010

2010-01-4 - Carolyn Schuk of Broadcast Engineering polls "people with real-world experience developing and deploying mobile TV and video," including CEO Sam Blackman, to predict what is in store for the next year.

The decade's top stories in Oregon tech: Part Two

2009-12-30 - Mike Rogoway of the Oregonian reports in a three-part series on the top stories in Oregon technology over the last ten years, highlighting Elemental's emergence last year and leadership potential. "The prospect of renewal remains, though, primarily through a Portland company called Elemental Technologies. Founded by Pixelworks vet Sam Blackman, Elemental has arrayed an impressive list of customers, advisers and financial backers."

Startups: Video processing draws investors

2009-12-27 - Oregonian business reporter, Jonathan Brinkman, follows up with Elemental on the last two years' growth as a business, including new employees, customers and investors, and venture capital's influence on start ups.

Elemental Technologies Accelerates Any-screen TV with NVIDIA GPU-based Transcoding Appliance

2009-12-15 - Broadcast Engineering provides a solid overview of recent trends driven by video encoding challenges and reports the numerous benefits of Elemental Server in transforming customer's batch transcoding workflows.

Elemental Technologies is Transcoding Video in "Record Time"

2009-11-25 - At NewTeeVee Live this month, Beet.TV caught up with Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies, who was launching a new server appliance for transcoding live HD video at very fast rates, "faster than real time," at the conference. The video interview covers the product's commercial launch and trends in transcoding.

Almost Famous: Elemental Technologies' Sam Blackman

2009-11-20 - In a new feature, "Almost Famous" All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-up, this time featuring Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies at the San Francisco NewTeeVee Live conference. Drake Martinet interviews Sam and learns about his preschool programming projects, his predictions for the online and mobile video space and more.

Nvidia’s Gamers Helped It Win Big Business

2009-11-19 - New York Times reporter Ashlee Vance reports from SuperComputing about NVIDIA's business shift to enterprise and research segments and highlights other companies' optimizing GPU technology, such as Elemental's video processing solutions.

Video: The Changing Economics of Video Processing

2009-11-13 - In a further video interview with Stacey Higginbotham from GigaOM on the show floor, Blackman predicted the cost of computing would be less than the cost of caching within three years, which would change the business of how people store and transcode content to make it more flexible. 

NewTeeVee Live: What's the Next Big Thing in Video?

2009-11-12 - NewTeeVee's Stacey Higginbotham and Katie Fehrenbacher recap the "Next Big Thing" announcements and predictions from the first round of presenters at the NewTeeVee Live conference, including CEO Sam Blackman's estimate that "unlike other forms of media the Internet will not destroy the pay-TV model."

Elemental Server Provides Enterprise-Class GPU Transcoding Acceleration

2009-11-12 - Tim Siglin of Streaming Media reports on the evolution of Elemental Server and explores Elemental Server's virtues as the first to market in GPU-accelerated transcoding. "GPU computing is a relatively new field, so we get questions about video quality vs CPU alternatives," says Blackman, when asked about the misunderstandings that Elemental hears in the general marketplace. "To prove the quality of a GPU system meets—and, in some cases, exceeds—CPU transcoding quality, we do an enormous amount of testing vs. top-of-the-line CPU codecs."

Speeding Premiere Pro CS4's H.264 Encoding with NVIDIA QuadroFX and Elemental Accelerator

2009-11-10 - John Virata of Digital Media Net highlights the positive benefits of using Elemental Accelerator to encode large jobs on a regular basis and finds exemplary performance while testing NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800 on HPZ400 workstation and Quadro FX 4800 on a Lenovo D20 ThinkStation workstation.

NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac

2009-11-05 - Erik Kuna of Layers reviews NVIDIA's Quadro FX 4800 and highlights how "Elemental Accelerator allows Adobe Premiere to render H.264 movies using the GPU at faster-than-real-time speeds, which is pretty much unheard of with CPU rendering.

Codebreakers

2009-11-01 - John Parnell of Digital Broadcast Middle East, "looks at some of the encoding conundrums and the latest products developed to solve them," including Elemental Server.

Elemental Announces a GPU Server for Video Production

2009-10-03 - Anshel Sag of Bright Side of News spoke with Elemental CEO Sam Blackman during his technology session at the GPU Technology Conference about the GPU-accelerated advancements demonstrated at the show, including Elemental Server and the technical preview of live streaming webcast of conference keynotes. Sag said, "one thing is certain - this is a company to watch for in 2010.

Voyager Capital's New Partner, Bruce Chizen, Keeps an Eye on Portland

2009-09-18 - Mike Rogoway of the Oregonian talks to area startups about Voyager Capital's most recent appointment of Bruce Chizen, former Adobe CEO and Elemental Technologies board member, as a partner and reports that Chizen is keeping a sharp eye on Portland entrepreneurs, since he feels like there is a lot of untapped potential.

Aprico, Elemental, and ViewCast Highlight New Offerings at IBC

2009-09-15 - Reporting from the trade show floor of IBC, Tim Siglin of Streaming Media highlights Elemental's product suite including Elemental Accelerator, a plug-in targeting professional video editors using Adobe Premiere CS4, the upcoming Elemental Server targeting the larger enterprise companies with a need of transcoding several simultaneous video streams, and technology previews of great things to come from Elemental.

Elemental Accelerator on NVIDIA Quadro GPUs

2009-09-01 - Mike McCarthy of HD4PC offers a positive review of Elemental Accelerator, a plug-in for Adobe Premiere CS4, discussing the various features and formats supported by the plug-in and goes on to demonstrate the various speed increases while encoding.

Six Startup CEOs On Their Company Culture, Boiled Down to One Word

2009-08-21 - Gregory Huang of Xconomy takes a look at startups, including Elemental, to see which types of corporate culture will ultimately lead to a company's success.  You will be interested to know what word CEO Sam Blackman selected when asked to describe the key to Elemental's culture.

Future Gazing at CableLabs' Innovation Showcase

2009-08-11 - Twice a year, tech companies descend on CableLabs’ Innovation Showcase to demo their wares for a group of cable operators. This week’s presentations during CableLabs’ Summer Conference included 11 companies, such as Elemental Technologies, reports Amy Maclean of CableFax.

HP Adds NVIDIA Quadro GPU-Accelerated Plug-in for Adobe Creative Suite 4 Users to Workstation Lineup

2009-08-07 - Ty Lowell of ProVideo Coalition News shares HP's announcement that it will make available Elemental Accelerator™ for NVIDIA® Quadro® plug-in for Adobe Creative Suite 4 users as an option now available on the full line of HP workstations - including HP Z Workstations - the NVIDIA CUDA-based Elemental Accelerator 2.0 plug-in software delivers further performance benefits when working with Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

Elemental Accelerator Showcased at SIGGRAPH 2009

2009-08-05 - Consumer Electronics Net reports on the appearance of Elemental Accelerator 2.0 plug-in for NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards can be seen at Siggraph 09 in PNY Booth #2017 along with the announcement that Hewlett Packard's HP Z workstations have been outfitted with the CUDA based plug-in to enhance and speed up processes in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

PNY's Carl Flygare talks graphics cards at SIGGRAPH09

2009-08-07- John Virata at Creative Mac interviews Carl Flygare at Siggraph about the newest and coolest graphics cards and technology.  Discussion includes the latest innovation in graphics cards, what the market is doing with them, and the distinct difference between new products and innovative products.

Latest Nvidia GPU Accelerated Plug-ins Designed for Adobe CS4

2009-07-16 - The Nvidia CUDA architecture-based Elemental Accelerator 2.0 for Windows, developed by Elemental Technologies is one of the plug-ins offered. Influenced by the CUDA parallel computing architecture it offloads H.264 video encoding to the Quadro GPU.

NVIDIA Offers Up GPU-accelerated Plug-ins for Quadro FX 4800

2009-06-30 - If you're a video editor with a need for speed and the $1800 NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800, several plug-ins are available that can utilize the computing power in the high-end GPU for some serious speed improvements. The discounts NVIDIA offers on the plug-ins, however, only appear to be for Windows PC users.

Elemental Accelerator Speeds Up Video Production with NVIDIA, Adobe Creative Suite integration

2009-06-29 - Elemental's already been getting kudos with Badaboom, their consumer-level product that eases the process of encoding video for iPhones and other mobile handsets. And today, they’re making headlines again with their professional-level product Accelerator, which integrates with both NVIDIA video cards and Adobe Creative Suite.

Elemental Debuts CUDA Plug-in for Adobe Creative Suite CS4

2009-06-29 - NVIDIA announced Elemental Technologies has released an Adobe Creative Suite CS4 plugin that should dramatically boost performance for users with NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards.

New Nvidia GPU-accelerated Plug-ins Boost Performance for Adobe

2009-06-29 - Nvidia has announced the availability of GPU-accelerated plug-in solutions for Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) users, optimized to run on a wide range of Nvidia Quadra graphics solutions.

Elemental Releases GPU-based Encoding Server

2009-05-20 - Pete Wylie at FierceOnlineVideo highlights Elemental's compatability with Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5 and dynamic streaming. "Callahan said Elemental Server is especially suited for deployments with these streaming technologies, as it can ingest one video file and output the multiple resolution and bitrate copies necessary for technologies faster than traditional quad-core servers."

Elemental Rolls Out Video Servers

2009-05-20 - Gregory Huang of Xcomony Seattle succintly reports on Elemental's new offering. "Elemental Server is meant to help studios, online video platforms, and large Internet video publishers deliver huge volumes of video to consumers smoothly, efficiently, and cheaply."

Elemental Shakes Up Video Servers With Parallel Processing

2009-05-20 - Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee is impressed at Elemental's flexibility and growth as a company.  "Now, Elemental is taking on a whole new category, by releasing its Elemental Server, which it says can do the job of seven dual quad-core CPU servers while taking up less space, using less power and costing less than half the price. Using the GPU for transcoding can be 5-10 times faster than using the CPU."

Elemental Introduces GPU-Based Video Processing System 

2009-05-20 - Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen from Streaming Media points out that Elemental Server is yet another implementation of using the GPU for video encoding. "Today, the company announced its enterprise-level product called Elemental Server, which puts four GPUs and two CPUs (they won't say which kind) in a single 2RU chassis. It's currently in beta, but is already in use at Brightcove, which worked with Elemental to improve the GUI and APIs."

Elemental Technologies' Super-fast Video Processing Could Slash Costs of Video Web Sites

2009-05-20 - Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat highlights tapping into the power of the GPU in his article about Elemental Server.  "Graphics chips are better at this than microprocessors because they do tasks in parallel, rather than a serial fashion. Blackman said his servers can process 32 different streams of video, or as many as four streams of 1080p high-definition video, at the same time."

Video Technology Gets Boost from Elemental

2009-05-20 - Sam Diaz at ZDNet focuses on the importance of technology like Elemental Server with the ever-rising dominance of online video.  "YouTube is streaming movies. Broadcast networks and networks are streaming full episodes of prime-time TV shows, as well as classics. And companies today are also embracing video with everything from marketing clips to video conferencing. The computing power needed a boost from something like this. The cost savings and energy efficiency are just icing on the cake."

Elemental Takes Transcoding to the GPU

2009-05-20 - Ryan Lawler of Contentinople tells major content owners and online video companies to take note with this article on the newly announced Elemental Server.  "While the cost of a single Elemental Server might be slightly higher than a commodity off-the-shelf CPU-only solution, the total cost of ownership is lower because the Elemental product takes up less space and uses less energy while providing better performance."

Game Informer Magazine features Badaboom in Gear

2009-03-23 - Badaboom is featured in the "Gear" section on page 22 of the April 2009 Game Informer Magazine issue titled "Bioshock 2." According to Game Informer, "we burned a 30-minute episode of Trailer Park Boys into PSP format in under 4 minutes using an Nvidia 8800GT." 

NewsHour with Jim Lehrer evening news segment on economic challenges to Pacific Northwest technology companies

2009-01-22 - Major tech companies such as Microsoft, Sony, Intel, and Dell are slashing thousands of jobs and facing rather difficult times ahead in today's economy.  Yet out of the shadows blooms smaller companies such as Elemental Technologies, who seemed to have found an interesting niche in the market.  "LEE HOCHBERG: Elemental shipped its product, called Badaboom, for the first time in October. Revenue was double expectations this year, and Blackman expects to be profitable. He says he never forgot his mom and dad's business sense."

Smoothing Out Jittery Internet Video, Elemental Technologies Looks to Reinvent How You Watch

2009-01-15 - Greg Huang discusses Elemental Technologie's beacon of hope on the way we watch video.  Attempts at re-inventing how video is being watched, from on the internet to portable devices that you can carry in your pocket, show very promising and exciting progress.  "With this technology in hand, Elemental started going after the professional video-editing market-makers of Blu-ray movies, for instance-and consumers who want to convert videos so they'll run on iPods, laptops, and other devices."

GPU Transcoding Throwdown: Elemental's Badaboom vs. AMD's Avivo Video Converter

2008-12-15 - AnandTech's second review of Badaboom.  This review is a bit more in depth about compairing AMD's Avivo converter with Elemental's Badaboom.  Results? Badaboom's performance was superior across the board.  Many features are still being worked on, but it has improved by such a large amount since the original beta that there is no doubt this will become a must-have for anyone with an Ipod, Iphone or any other portable media device!  "No matter how you slice it though, Elemental has a much better product than AMD is offering with the Avivo video converter."

NVIDIA Quadro CX Review and Adobe CS4 GPU Acceleration

2008-12-11 - Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective reviews a Quadro CX card along with RapiHD Accelerator and finds, "the RapiHD encoder has a bit more flexibility than the Badaboom application and thus we were much more satisfied with the apples-to-apples benchamarks we were able to run."

The Rise of H.264 Video Encoders

 2008-10-06 - As H.264 encoders become more popular, what is needed now is some clever software. The race begins with companies such as Elemental Technologies, AMD, Ambric, and Intel. Which one shows the most promise? "It definitely shows the future" says Jon Peddie of Badaboom.  "When the GPU is used, it's mostly used for transcoding; e.g., getting from MPEG-2 to H.264. You can do that on a CPU, but it takes a long time; the GPU is about 5 to 10 times faster."

It's Elemental:  Cutting edge video processing

2008-09-20 - From the outside, what Elemental Technologies does is pretty easy to understand. Making video software that converts DVDs to play on handheld devices such as Ipods, Iphones, and the PSP. Elemental is getting ready to launch their first batch of software, titled Badaboom, in Sept. 2008.  "Blackman says ETI's one-of-a-kind technology - essentially a graphics processing unit-accelerated video encoding/transcoding engine - gives the company an edge over competitors when it comes to performance, cost and flexibility."

Intel Grinds Towards Graphics

2008-08-04 - Ready... set... go! The race begins with Intel and Nvidia.  Intel is trying to crack into the graphics market which is no easy task, as Nvidia dominates the market with ease.  The stakes are high so this will be an interesting battle.  "Intel's products are typically built around two or four core processors, but the Larrabee chips are expected to have 12 to 48 processors."

Elemental applies parallel processing to online video

2008-07-21 - Clifford Carlsen discusses in The Deal the much anticipated video software being developed by Elemental Technologies, the new investment venure and additional board members and observers that have been recently added to the team.  "With the new investment, the company adds Neil Sequeira, from General Catalyst Partners and Erik Benson from Voyager to its board, and also brings in former Intel Corp. and Intel Capital executive Frank Gill and Adobe Systems Inc. [ADBE] CEO Bruce Chizen as an observer."

Voyager, others back Portland video startup

2008-07-18 - John Cook, venture capital reporter, writes about Elemental's new funding from Voyager Capital and General Catalyst Partners in his blog.  "Former Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, who is serving as a board observer, said in a statement that the company's software 'will radically improve how video is processed for content providers and end users.'"

Elemental Technologies lands first venture investment

2008-07-18 - Mike Rogoway, an Oregonian reporter, discusses the exciting potential and opportunity of Elemental Technologies with it's first venture captial investmet of 7.1 million dollars.  "ETI's software adapts or edits computer video. It can convert a DVD for playback on iPods and other gadgets, or speed the editing process for high-end users."

Elemental Technologies Raises $7.1M

2008-07-18 - Stacey Higginbotham discusses the exciting possibilities of Elemental's new technology and the speed and sexiness of which it can translate high quality videos, taking minutes instead of hours.  Complete with YouTube video demonstration.  "Elemental can rip the file in minutes - it can also rip it to a variety of different devices simultaneously."

Elemental Technologies sparks $7.1 million investment

2008-07-18 - Rick Turoczy gives a brief overview and a fair amount of praise for the exciting new software in production by Elemental Technologies.  Converting video files is frustratingly slow, Rick stresses the importance of how quickly translating video files with impact the HD culture.  "To be successful, we're going to have to be able to encode and upload video as quickly as we can download it. And Elemental may just be able to deliver."

Elementary, My Dear Video:  Elemental Technologies Raises $7.1 Million, Goes After Media Conversion Market

2008-07-18 - Internet video is all the rage these days, and it just keeps getting bigger and better. One fact remains, however, and that is that videos still need to be converted. Gregory Huang discusses the exciting new possibilities of Elementals' new BadaBoom software and the impact that this will have on the internet video world.  "So if you want to take TV shows or home movies from your digital video recorder and play them on your iPod during your commute, you need to convert them first. Elemental's software, called Badaboom Media Converter, does this more quickly and painlessly than was possible before."

Elemental Nabs $5.5M

2008-07-18 - Aliza Earnshaw discusses the exciting possibilities of harnessing the power of the GPU instead of only relying on the CPU.  This opens up a whole new realm of possibilites, including influencing video games, image mapping, scientific calculation software, and finance.  "What makes Elemental's technology so different from other video converting programs is that it runs on a computer's graphics chip, instead of running on the computer's main processor."

More Details on Elemental's H.264 encoder

2008-06-23 -  This AnandTech post goes into further details about Elemental's new Badaboom technology, including breakdowns and comparisons on performance with different systems. There has been a great deal of excitement and discussion with this new software in the world of video conversion and it appears to be not only promising, but revolutionary.  "Elemental Technologies has been working on a technology they called RapiHD, which is a GPU-accelerated H.264 video encoder and the consumer implementation of RapiHD is a software application called Badaboom (yes, that's what it's actually called, there's even a video)."

First Look: Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 Series

2008-06-16 -  PC World does a first look at the new NVIDIA GPU based cards that will incorporate up to 1GB of frame buffer memory as well as 240 processors. In the article, the author confirms the performance boost gained by using Elemental's Badaboom transcoder with such cards.  "A great example is Elemental Technologies' upcoming Badaboom Media Converter, a video encoder that runs entirely off an NVIDIA GPU -- as opposed to just about every other encoder around that's CPU-bound."

Graphics Chips Gun for Supremacy in Silicon Showdown

2008-06-02 -  Elemental gets a nod from notable tech magazine Wired in this article about the GPU. It covers many of the applications and companies that are starting to make use of the new architecture and emphasizes that not all of them are for teenage gamers.  "Many high-end GPUs also include a video unit for faster encoding and decoding of video data, which companies like Elemental Technologies are already taking advantage of with new GPU-accelerated video-processing software."

Encodage H.264 sur GPU : interview des pionniers du secteur

2008-04-24 -  Bruno Cournier of PCinpact.com reviews Elemental Accelerator on Adobe Preimere Pro CS4 and finds commendable H.264 performance: "...solution de la firme permet de compresser une vidéo dans le dernier format de rigueur sur le marché, le H.264" or "The solution allows the firm to compress a video format in the last rigor on the market, H.264."

Vital Signs of a Young Regional Company

2007-12-29 -  The Product: RapiHD - video-processing software that helps computers make greater use of their graphics-processing unit, or GPU.  The need: Most PCs run off their central processing unit, leaving the GPU underused. Elemental's software will help PC users leverage the more powerful GPU to receieve, process and edit video files, said Sam Blackman, chief executive... 

Elemental Education

2007-12-14 -  Elemental, located in downtown Portland is the brainchild of a group of former Pixelworks Inc. employees. Steeped in video chip design, Elemental's founders say they've discovered how to speed up video processing by harnessing untapped power in mass-produced graphics chips... 

Elemental wins at Bend Venture Conference

2007-10-20 -  Elemental Technologies Inc., a Portland company that says it can vastly speed digital video production using standard personal computers, is this year's winner of the Bend Venture Conference's $150,000 investment prize. Subject, of course, to further negotiation and due diligence.  Elemental Technologies beat out four finalists for the conference's main prize, nudging out close finisher RocketBux, a Bend-based company that has designed a new technology for beaming promotional coupons directly to consumer cell phones, said Bruce Juhola, one of the conference's organizers.  Juhola is the managing partner of this year's group of 29 investors, who deliberated for an hour after the daylong conference to pick a winner... 

New fund drops $205K on technology company

2007-10-12 -  Elemental Technologies Inc. has received a $205,000 investment from the Oregon Angel Fund. With that money in hand, the startup has raised another $295,000, andhas commitments from investors want to put in $110,000 more.