Video Processing Perspectives

If you've been planning to add a graphics board to your system, there's no better time to do it than now. You can save up to $799 with a brand new bundle that combines the NVIDIA® Quadro® CX graphics board with Adobe Premiere® Pro CS4. The bundle is available now from leading resellers, e-tailers and retailers at an Estimated Street Price of $1,999 USD, which sold separately would be $2,798. To learn more, click here.

This detailed review of the Nvidia Quadro CX from Digital Content Producer takes a close look at accelerated encoding with RapiHD and supplies a wide range of encoding test results. Included among the positive comments from the reviewer:

"I compared the quality of the Elemental Accelerator and MainConcept 720p files and found them very similar—a good result for Accelerator since Premiere Pro's Main Concept encoder is a very high-quality producer."

It's been a little while since I've posted; between the launches of Badaboom® and RapiHD™ Accelerator we've been busy at Elemental! Both products are off to a great start, and our fourth quarter revenue handily surpassed expectations. The team is in heads down mode now, getting ready for NAB 2009 tradeshow -- keep your eyes peeled for some exciting announcements around that time. On another note, if your day is anything like mine, many conversations begins with, "How are you holding up in this economy?" Startup companies are always fraught with risk but the tremendous declines in the market coupled with a frozen IPO market makes it more difficult than ever to get a company funded. The Lehrer NewsHour had a nice piece recently covering how the economy is impacting startup companies, including a segment on Elemental. The report covered several Portland area tech companies, some of which are struggling and some of which are surviving. Elemental is in the latter category (so far!), and some of the fundamental philosophies by which we run the company have helped a lot. A few of these include:

• Capital efficiency is a priority throughout the organization.
• Do everything possible to fund the company with revenue rather than debt or equity.
• A diversified product line creates more work but increases the odds of a hit product.

It's a brutal economy, and there are no guarantees of success, but minimizing dependence on outside funding sources is more important now for technology startups than at any time in the past many years.

In an article posted December 17, 2008, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes notes the 4x performance increase attainable for H.264 video encoding using the Elemental Accelerator plug-in with the Quadro CX and Adobe's CS4. The article can be found here.

Ryan Shrout has posted a review entitled "NVIDIA Quadro CX and Adobe CS4 GPU Acceleration" on PC Perspective's website. The Elemental Accelerator, which is bundled with the Quadro CX, is featured prominently and positively in the review. The article can be found here. Select excerpts are listed in the full entry.

"The NVIDIA Quadro CX is billed as "the accelerator for Adobe CS4 Suite" and it is in fact just that.  In nearly every respect in fact, the Quadro CX is identical in features and hardware to the Quadro FX 4800 graphics card with the exception of support for SDI output in Premiere Pro and After Effects as well as the RapiHD plug-in for video encoding.  Those added features are really what make the Quadro CX stand out from the crowd."
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"The encode process using the Elemental Accelerator encoder on the NVIDIA Quadro CX took just under four minutes to complete while using the CPU-based Adobe encoder the process took nearly eight full minutes.  The GPU-accelerated encoder has essentially cut the rendering time in half - and while 236 seconds and 470 seconds doesn't seem like a long time, extrapolating this out to 1 hour+ length videos you can clearly see how getting half of your render time back could save a lot of time."
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