Fusion-io and Adobe have announced that the upcoming Creative Suite 6 Production Premium software will benefit from tighter integration with ioMemory products like the new Fusion ioFX. This tighter integration is all about application acceleration, with software packages such as Adobe After Effects seeing significant performance enhancements, bringing video manipulation into the realm of real-time manipulation, instead of previously being limited by disk I/O. These improvements mean creativity doesn’t need to take a back seat to traditional I/O bottlenecks when working with the highest resolution stereoscopic formats.
Fusion-io and Adobe have announced that the upcoming Creative Suite 6 Production Premium software will benefit from tighter integration with ioMemory products like the new Fusion ioFX. This tighter integration is all about application acceleration, with software packages such as Adobe After Effects seeing significant performance enhancements, bringing video manipulation into the realm of real-time manipulation, instead of previously being limited by disk I/O. These improvements mean creativity doesn’t need to take a back seat to traditional I/O bottlenecks when working with the highest resolution stereoscopic formats.
In a keynote at NAB 2012 surrounding "How Creativity and Technology Merge to Influence Storytelling and Film," Steve Forde from Adobe, Steve Wozniak and Vincent Brisebois from Fusion-io, and VFX supervisor Rob Legato spoke about how traditional storage mediums have largely been a limiting factor in movie production. As video resolutions increase from 1080P to 4K, or studios transition to stereoscopic video, bandwidth is reaching a level where traditional storage arrays create bottlenecks. To cope with this increasing load, systems need to be scalable and expandable, and storage solutions like the ioFX accelerator are virtually required to make production of newer movies possible. Rob Legato commented that even with access to the latest hardware, rendering of a single shot of the movie Hugo took months, even with the help of a high-end storage solutions.
One of the limiting factors of current production software is that to process and render frames requires massive bandwidth and I/O with newer video formats. With existing solutions, large amounts of wait times are needed to re-process the video during edits, breaking the creative process. The next big evolution, which devices such as the Fusion ioFX make possible, is editing in real-time. Movie production specialists can fix flaws in the video without breaking their chain of thought, where in the past they might have had to go for a coffee break while the production computer renders a new segment of video.
The most interesting message from this keynote though is that even as technology improves and storage performance goes up, the movie industry and others will continue to push the boundaries to thrill audiences. This means that visual effects coordinators like Rob Legato will still stress (or break) the latest hardware in their push to create something viewers haven’t seen before and continue to push the technology that’s available to its potential.
