In Broadcast - February 2013 - 39

ISSUE 16 - FEBRUARY 2013 | WWW.INBROADCAST.COM

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

N E W S

InFOCUS
The Ongoing Drive Towards Real-Time Motion Graphic Workﬂows Cont.
with more polygons, materials,
lighting and animation, so does the
demand on the graphics card. It
can become quite a task for a card
to display a detailed still preview in
the editor, let alone an animation.
If your editor animation preview is
stuttering, a faster, more powerful
card will help. You ideally want an
animation preview that is similar
to the final rendered result as for
motion graphics and visual effects
the timing of the animation is of
prime importance.”
In terms of checking the speed of
hardware, this is something anyone
can do with benchmarking tools.
MAXON actually provides a free
benchmarking tool that checks
CPU and OpenGL Performance
called Cinebench. This is helpful
in determining how fast your
current hardware is, and a simple
web search for ‘Cinebench scores’
makes it easy to compare your
hardware to others. Cinebench is
available at www.cinebench.com
The search for further
enhancements continues as Stacy
explains: “We need AMD to create
the new features and then we need
to support them – both companies

work together under NDA to check
what each are developing for
the future. It’s very much a joint
collaboration to ensure customers
get the best from what each
company has to offer.”

Liam Stacy,
MAXON UK
Managing Director

the
“…The closer ﬁnal
preview and
render, the less
time artists need
to spend test
rendering

”

Jamieson adds: “We talk to
MAXON and they say they want
to do certain things in the future,
they want to support certain modes.
We are on the committee called the
ARB that runs OpenGL … We look
at what features that need to be
offered in the OpenGL kernels and

we write bits for that to ensure that
features that they want
its supported by the hardware. That
going forward.”
is the sort of technology that then
For the immediate future it’s about
we go and talk to MAXON to say
dealing with larger models so that you
these are the new features that we
can maintain ultimate performance
know about – what features are you
within a normal 3D non-rendered
interested in?”
window. The holy grail remains high
quality and real-time, but for now
That process, he said, is led by a
committee – there are some strong
the maximum possible broadcast
players on there, such as Apple,
motion graphic quality must wait
Dell and HP. “It is quite serious to
for the full render. The key is that
make sure that we get the things
the real-time display visualisation
that people want. And it’s moving
in the display window is getting
the technology forward all the time.”
closer. So close, that quite often
Jamieson says: “We tend to deal
the window display representation
with the major software companies
can just suffice for broadcast in nondirectly and then we take that to
critical applications.
the central committee that controls
the hardware –
it’s a double
re l a t i o n s h i p .
The whole thing
about having a
relationship
b e t w e e n
software
companies
and ourselves
is important
to make sure
that they get
the relevant MAXON CINEMA 3D Bermuda promo (Taylor James)
39

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In Broadcast - February 2013

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