Jason Cox has enjoyed capturing images since receiving his first Mickey-Matic film camera when he was four years old. Growing up in the Washington, D.C. area, he spent much of his youth wandering around with some form of a camera, still or video, in hand.

Jason graduated from Penn State with degrees in film production and English. After spending a couple years as an entertainment journalist for a newspaper, Jason returned to D.C. to strike out on his own, eventually starting up his own LLC, Some Might Say Media. He currently juggles a mixed workload of freelance video production and editing as well as teaching courses as a certified trainer for both Apple and Adobe software. His first book, The Final Cut Pro X Cookbook will be released by Packt Publishing in October.

Outside of his working life, Jason enjoys traveling (he met his Scottish wife in New Zealand – long story!), playing old school Nintendo games, going to music and cultural events, and drinking chocolate milk.

This month, we are back at our roots, Future Media Concepts, so invite your colleagues to come out for a night of pizza/soda and knowledge sharing as Jason Cox dives into the “choosing the right tool for your next editing/post job!”

Jason Cox presents Choosing the right tool for your next editing/post job

Agenda:

Presenter: Manny/AJA

• Latest updates from AJA on drivers and products to include any updates on Adobe integration

Presenter: David K. Helmly, Adobe Systems, Inc; Technical Sales Manager, Pro Video/Audio Products Americas

• Introduction
• Review of some of the Creative Suite 6 products:
• Prelude – for logging, creating searchable markers and temporal metadata that flow through post production
• Premiere – video editing working natively with the latest mobile, DSLR, HD and RAW formats, edit, trim, and adjust effects in real time, stabilize shaky footage, with a sleek, revamped user interface and expanded multi-cam support
• After Effects – create cinematic visual effects and motion graphics
• Open questions on ANY Creative Suite 6 application

Winner’s Circle Raffle!

See our events section for details! Our June meeting will be to support this event and meet some interested CS6 colleagues in our area and network!

Rod

The Adobe Mercury Playback technology also allows users to get more power from their CPUs and GPUs. By using the CPUs and GPUs in parallel, you get unbelievable performance running in a clean, 64-bit operating system (remember, all future versions of Premiere are 64 bit ONLY, which means a minimum of OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard or Windows 7 64 bit). By running in parallel, the CPU can take over tasks where the GPU is not used.

Important note to Adobe product users!
Don’t buy any 32 bit hardware or system software if you plan on upgrading to the next version whenever it ships. This new technology runs in a pure, 64 bit software and hardware operating environment.

MOVING TO 64-BIT SYSTEMS

Today’s video production workflows benefit tremendously from applications that are designed to run natively on 64-bit operating systems. This is why Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects® will be 64-bit native applications in the next release and no longer support 32-bit operating systems. To take full advantage of Adobe software’s extensive optimizations for 64-bit systems now, and native 64-bit support in the future, Adobe recommends the following:

For PC users:

Most PCs purchased since 2005 are already running 64-bit operating systems or can be easily upgraded. To upgrade your computer, we recommend you install:

• A 64-bit edition of Microsoft® Windows Vista® or Windows® 7
• Hardware drivers for Windows Vista 64 bit (NOTE: 64-bit drivers are necessary to run the hardware; 32-bit drivers do not work)
• Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista

For Mac users:

Mac OS X and Snow Leopard (v10.6) are already 64-bit capable. All you need to do is add more RAM.

Upgrading your RAM:

For high-end workflows, more memory improves performance significantly, making a 64-bit operating system essential. These guidelines will help you:

RAM Guidelines for High End Workflows

For optimal performance, we recommend a minimum of 12GB of RAM.

ADOBE MERCURY PLAYBACK ENGINE

Adobe is working on a playback and rendering engine for Adobe Premiere Pro called the Mercury Playback Engine. This new engine is NVIDIA® GPU-accelerated, 64-bit native, and architected for the future. Native 64-bit support enables you to work more fluidly on HD and higher resolution projects, and GPU acceleration speeds effects processing and rendering.

The Mercury Playback Engine offers these benefits:

• Open projects faster, refine effects-rich HD and higher resolution sequences in real time, enjoy smooth scrubbing, and play back complex projects without rendering.
• See results instantly when applying multiple color corrections and effects across many video layers.
• Work in real time on complex timelines and long-form projects with thousands of clips — whether your project is SD, HD, 2K, 4K, or beyond.

Ensure your system is ready to take advantage of the Mercury Playback Engine in a future version of Adobe Premiere Pro. The Mercury Playback Engine works hand-in-hand with NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology to give you amazingly fluid, real-time performance. See it in action

If you’re interested in upgrading your system today, the following graphics cards are supported by the Mercury Playback Engine:

• GeForce GTX 285 (Windows and Mac)
• Quadro FX 3800 (Windows)
• Quadro FX 4800 (Windows and Mac)
• Quadro FX 5800 (Windows)
• Quadro CX

Adobe is planning on supporting additional cards as they become available, including some of the new NVIDIA solutions based on the upcoming Fermi parallel computing architecture.