As compression demands for various applications like PDAs, phones, game consoles and web etc has grown exponentially, CPUs have not been able to crunch data fast enough and transcoding times have been generally slow. Open GL allowed the OS to push rendering to the GPUs, which opened up 3D rendering and games. But what about video?
Over the last 4 years, OS and hardware designers have been pushing video transcoding to the GPUs of graphics cards with software applications like ATI's Avivo Video Converter. Elemental came out with Badaboom with Nvidia. Both converters are faster than CPU only conversions by multiple times, with the Avivo and ATI cards winning the speed demon contest, but losing the quality contest to Nvidia's Badaboom.
Basically GPUs were designed to handle high power processing faster than CPUs. In Nvidia's case, they code named the special architecture CUDA.
I was first introduced to the CUDA based products for video via the Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and the RapiHD plugins from Elemental Technologies with the Nvidia Quadro CX, which was purpose built for transcoding various formats. Basically an in-field editor could rush dailies online at HD quality for principals to view the same day almost, which was an impressive achievement. My buddy was editing the dailies of director approved cuts at the film set in LA for principals in various parts of the world to view over the internet.
I was so impressed I started to relearn Adobe CS4 Production. Now with a 64bit OS, it was possible to crunch HD quality H.264 clips much faster. It also come with acceleration for MPEG2, XDCAM, AVCHD and HDV as well as various efx within Premiere Pro.
The latest iteration is PNY's Nvidia FX series chipsets bundled with Elemental Tech's Accelerator, the evolution from the RapiHD plugins. The FX series includes accelerated HD-SDI outputs which means instant feedback on edits. The great thing about Adobe CS4 is that it is dual platform, so Apple Mac Pro machines can also use the FX series (ONLY one though : FX4800 for Mac). The limited test I did came to about 50% faster on a Mac Pro 3.2.
FYI, the Elemental Accelerator plug-in is available for purchase for those who have the GPU already at 50% off. PLEASE check if your GPU can run the software.
Basically with Adobe CS4 and Nvidia's dedicated support for CS4 with CUDA etc, it's jumped ahead of the class of NLE packages with respects to transcoding. The great news is that other CS4 programs like Photoshop and After Effects also benefit from the CUDA technology.
** Author note: This little post was written way back in Feb 09 but life sorta caught me and I forgot to post. I've updated it slightly with the Accelerator information but the information is dated by technology standards.
