Elemental Technologies (ETI) Announces World's First GPU-Accelerated H.264/AVC Encoder

ETI's RapiHD^TM software harnesses the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU), giving Adobe Premiere Pro users up to 7x the performance of CPU-only solutions

Portland, Ore. — April 14, 2008 — Elemental Technologies Inc. (ETI), a leading provider of massively parallel video processing software, announced today that its new GPU-accelerated RapiHD^TM H.264/AVC Encoder Plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro offers up to 700 percent better performance than conventional CPU-only solutions. Elemental Technologies will demonstrate the RapiHD^TM H.264/AVC Encoder Plug-in at the NAB show in Las Vegas this week, booth SL6528.

The RapiHD^TM H.264/AVC Encoder Plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro is a GPU-accelerated codec that runs on personal computers containing NVIDIA G80 and later series video cards. AVC/H.264 Main Profile encoding runs up to 7 times faster than CPU-only solutions, allowing faster than real-time high-definition encoding using widely-available off-the-shelf hardware. Elemental's software takes advantage of the CUDA SDK, an architecture created by NVIDIA Corporation that allows low-level access to GPU hardware.

"ETI's GPU-accelerated RapiHD^TM plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro will be a great option for our customers," said Giles Baker, group product manager for editing workflows at Adobe. "Many of them already have the GPU necessary to get hardware acceleration from ETI's software. The plug-in will offload the CPU so that Premiere Pro users can work faster and be more efficient with their time."

The RapiHD^TM Adobe Premiere Pro plug-in has support for a wide range of bitrates (500 kbps to 100 Mbps) and resolutions (CIF to 1080p), and supports both H.264/AVC Main and Baseline profiles. It has user-selectable ABR and VBR rate control modes, and allows for programmable GOP lengths.

"We are extremely excited about ETI's CUDA-powered RapiHD^TM Video Platform," said Jeff Brown, general manager of the NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group. "Elemental is providing an excellent example of harnessing the power of NVIDIA GPUs for accelerating video processing."

Like other RapiHD^TM products, the H.264/AVC Encoding Plug-in takes advantage of the graphics processing unit (GPU) to perform high-quality video encoding tasks on off-the-shelf hardware. Previously, the only way to get the computational performance necessary for high-performance video processing was to use costly, specialized hardware such as Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) or Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). ETI's RapiHD^TM software platform enables users to utilize modern GPU architectures, offering better performance, lower total system cost, and the flexibility to run on Linux, Windows, or MacOS-based systems.

The RapiHD^TM H.264/AVC Encoder Plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro will be available in late summer of 2008. It will be available through a variety of retail and online channels. ETI's other products include RapiHD^TM AVC/H.264 Baseline Profile Encoder SDK, RapiHD^TM AVC-Intra (H.264 Intra) Encoder SDK, the RapiHD^TM MPEG-2 Decoder SDK, and the RapiHD^TM Universal Scaler SDK. For more information on ETI's products and technology, please visit our web site at www.elementaltechnologies.com.

About Elemental Technologies, Inc.

Elemental Technologies, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, is a software company providing high-performance video solutions that take advantage of massively parallel architectures. The software platform achieves the performance levels of specialized components using off-the-shelf hardware. The RapiHD^TM Video Platform is ideally suited for a variety of video applications ranging from broadcast infrastructure to professional video editing to Internet video processing.

http://www.elementaltechnologies.com/

Media Contact

Julie Williams
503-961-3261
press@elementaltechnologies.com

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