Keeping pixels present posted.
Monday, April 27th, 2009
I really like photography…I enjoy my own blurry efforts, I’m more delighted by Sammy’s visions of the natural and un-natural world, and sometimes, when I’m trying to get some creative traction, it’s easy to stumble near-mindlessly through endless seas of online JPEGs, most quite beautiful, some just tiny doorways into a life I’m not getting anywhere near.
I’ve been talking with Sam about a couple of new cameras that are just nearly almost on the verge of being released, and with luck and a clarity of consumer vision, I might be off on another binge of pixel-gathering in the coming months. I kinda keep telling myself, “self, your older, future incarnations are going to be very happy you’ve captured the soul-moments of these little chunks of your world when you’re sitting in your space future home five or ten years hence.”
No, I really don’t talk like that at all, not even to my future self. But I do like having these representations of what is…for real, for now.
Adobe announces Creative Suite CSOLPC®
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the Adobe® Creative Suite® CSOLPC® product family, a breakthrough release of the industry-leading design and development software optimized for the One Laptop Per Child XO machine, running a version of the Linux-based operating system with the distinctive Sugar GUI. The release will, for the first time, enable entire villages of small children to use Adobe After Effects® and Adobe Photoshop® on a computer they understand and use everyday—the OLPC XO—to make a creative contribution to the world by taking on the ever-growing number of film and video industry projects that require rotoscoping, motion tracking, color retouching, and wire removal.
“In tough global economic times, film, video, and print production companies are looking for even newer ways to outsource labor, especially to countries where the technological infrastructure is in a nascent form”, said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer at Adobe. “We think this is a win-win for production houses and the growing surplus of small rural villages around the globe with bored, XO-trained children, waiting to join the digital production line creating sparkling, state-of-the-art entertainment for global audiences.”
The pricing for the CSOLPC® package is similarly innovative. Users at large, successful design firms in the western world who purchase a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4 SuperPremium® (USD$ 2299) will be simultaneously purchasing a copy of CSOLPC® for a small child in Ulan Bator, Peru, Bangladesh, Vietnam, or any of 16 other countries which have signed up for the pilot program.
Once entire villages of children have activated the software over the convenient XO wireless mesh network, they will begin to receive 2K and 4K film frames to rotoscope and retouch using the Adobe After Effects® application, which will break the large frames up into dozens of small tiles optimized for the child’s XO and attention requirements. The finished frame will be then reassembled and sent back to a central server in San Jose, where it will be securely returned to the film or video studio who requested the job. The process is seamless and transparent on both ends.
Because of the tight memory and disk space requirements of the ultra-portable OLPC laptop, the standard Adobe Installer program will not run on a single XO; instead, establishing a mesh network of at least a dozen OLPC XO laptops is required. The process has all the speed and convenience that Adobe customers have come to expect.
