Maile the doggy journalist spent a frenetic day working the exhibit floor at Siggraph in Los Angeles, CA. We took the Metrolink train from Oceanside to LA Union Station and than the Metro [two lines] to get to the convention. When finally there we turned her on for one frame every two seconds and it is like a doggy trip! View it at the end of this article. We did stop along the way to find some pretty spectacular new technology for videographers. Most noteworthy was the new NVidia 5000M graphics card for really powerful notebook computers.
Shawn Worsell, an Nvidia Senior Product Manager and Adobe’s Dennis Radeke gave us a demonstration of an HP Elitebook 8740W running Premiere Pro with half a dozen clips running in parallel on the timeline with color correction and other effects. The timeline was NOT RENDERED meaning that it was pure hardware and software muscle to play back six pictures on a large flatscreen monitor in real time! We won’t go too far into the technicalities cause any VIDIOT can get the specs by googling.
It was the culmination of a long held dream for Videography Lab and it’s doggy journalist to finally see that notebooks could become “videography workstations”, since we have harped about this to Adobe and on the Creative Cow forums for years. The HP notebook that was working at Siggraph was maxed out at 16GB of memory. Coming soon is the Dell Precision M6500 which will sport up to 32GB of RAM.
NOW A FEW CAVEATS! No notebooks with the Nvidia 5000M are selling yet! Oh yeah . . . if you go on the web you’ll see BUY NOW on a dozen or more sites, but we VIDIOTS are here to tell you that release of these powerhouses will not be until September 2010.
The second caveat is PRICE! The web merchants will show you under $2000 for some “deals”. Don’t believe it. “To get a notebook fully optimized with 32GB RAM, Nvidia 5000M and all the goodies needed to optimize the Adobe Mercury engine your looking at over $5000″ according to the experts at Siggraph. So early adopters will be paying the price . . . That’s what we call being on the bleeding edge of technology.
It does not in any way demean the magnificent achievement of Adobe-Nvidia-PC Notebook manufacturers that such powerful machines will come at a high price out of the gate. If your really hungry for portable performance than it’s only a couple of months away. You can get your software ahead of time and run it on your older machines until the launch. You can also W A I T for a few more months and competitive market forces will drop the price of all hardware a fair amount. So you’re looking at end of 2010 as a fair estimate of when to make the jump to a first generation “videography workstation”.
In a few days we’ll post how a Ringmaster in the Videography Circus uses the workstation to organize a creative team work-flow. Ciao 4 Now!
PS. Meanwhile I gotta go back to Premiere Pro and grab another 20 or so still frames so the music will last long enough to NOT CLIP the words of Drowning Pools “Bodies” tune which we really liked.
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