The future of digital media - Special Advertising Section

Post, Nov, 2002

Intel[R] technology, together with leading software solutions, can handle even the most demanding challenges in digital content creation.

If you've seen a big-budget theatrical movie recently, chances are there's Intel[R] inside. Many films are using digital technology to enhance over 60 percent of their scenes, and that's where Intel's technology makes its mark, even when you can't see it. To accomplish this massive amount of work in less time, Hollywood's animation and special-effects houses are rapidly replacing proprietary workstations with Intel solutions-based workstations and servers.

Like Corporate America, Hollywood is now driven by two compelling dictates: do more with less, and do it faster. Gone is the excess of Lord of the Rings-like budgets as movie makers have been forced to find cost-effective ways to produce ever more complex animations and special effects. Since even a 10 percent boost in performance can shave weeks off production time, working with the highest-performance computing platform is absolutely mission critical.

To achieve this difficult combination of performance and affordability, Hollywood is increasingly turning to Intel. For example, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) *, a division of Lucas Digital Ltd. LLC *, recently announced a deployment of 600 Intel[R] Pentium[R] 4 processor-based animation workstations. According to Cliff Plumer, ILM's chief technology officer, "Having Intel processors at the core of our desktop systems provides greater quality and productivity because the technology can handle more iterations with greater frequency."

Perhaps technology consultant Grant Boucher said it best in a recent interview on Internet.com. Describing his work for Digital Revelations *, the digital arm of film studio Revelations Entertainment *, Boucher commented, "We can go entirely Intel with no sacrifice in quality while maintaining a substantial price/performance advantage. The trick with Intel is there's no reason to use anything else. You can do everything you want on Intel architecture."

Meeting the Demands of the New Millennium

Of course, you don't have to work on movies to benefit from Intel's price/performance and the breadth of software support. Intel is helping graphics and video professionals who work within Corporate America to manage a greatly expanded range of tasks, while creating entire new user groups that decentralize content creation in the business.

For example, the Internet and the ubiquity of DVD players have opened up two significant distribution options for corporate videos. Of course, legacy analog video-editing equipment can't adapt to these new media, forcing video producers to find new tools and platforms. Increasingly, Intel architecture-based computers are the platform of choice for these new tools.

To reach the broadest audience, many Web publishers distribute streams in multiple formats like Windows * Media, QuickTime *, MPEG-4 * and Real Video *. Producing multiple streams for each video can be very time consuming unless you have a tool like Pinnacle's StreamFactory *.

A rack-mountable, Intel[R] Xeon[[TM] processor family-powered scalable encoder, StreamFactory can produce up to four different formats in real time, with more streams possible by scaling with multiprocessor- based systems.

Some of the nation's largest organizations are realizing the efficiencies of digital media. At ChevronTexaco *, tech staff employs four StreamFactory encoders to meet the demand for streaming media. Some of the company's employee groups, like the Black Employees Network *, now use on-demand webcasts for their meetings. At companies like ChevronTexaco, streaming media benefits both employer and employee. Employees have a great new way to communicate and employers are grateful for the cost effectiveness of the digital media solution.

Video-editing programs like Adobe Premiere * output into most streaming formats, and MPEG-2, streamlining DVD production. According to Dennis Chominsky, president of Marketwyse *, an integrated advertising, marketing, and public relations agency, this makes Premiere a better production environment than the $25,000 workstations previously used for most production work.

"Premiere has all the functionality of my older dedicated editing stations, with much more frequent updates," explained Chominsky. "MPEG-2 encoding is quite fast, and offers better workflow than our hardware-based MPEG-2 encoder. This, and the bundled DVD authoring software in Premiere 6.5, essentially obsoletes my previous DVD solution, which cost thousands more."

Live Event Broadcasting

Intel solutions-based computers also play a significant role in the production and distribution of live streaming events. For example, NewTek's Video Toaster * [2], provides live switching between up to 24 live sources, with real-time keying, character generation and special effects--an ideal setup for live event broadcasting.

When installed in a dual Intel Xeon processor-based workstation, Video Toaster [2] can also direct the final output stream to a Windows Media Encoder on the same computer, which can encode and stream the video at very high quality. After demonstrating this capability to a corporate client, Sy Witt, President of Ramona Rose Studios* commented, "We sent a live 700Mbps Windows Media stream to some of our clients as a demonstration. The combination of real-time switching, keying and DDR playback was something to behold. I'd nearly forgotten how much fun live switching in a real-time environment was."