This blog usually isn’t for industry commentary and such, but you know, when Adobe starts moving the pixels around in new ways I do get excited.
Adobe’s “Pixel Bender” framework — which facilitates fast, cross-platform, single-frame image-processing filters — will be available in Flash and After Effects, and presumably other imaging apps as well. (It should be useful in Photoshop and Illustrator and Premiere.)
Adobe developer Tinic Uro reveals some important differences between Flash 10’s support, and After Effects’.
In particular, on Flash, a Pixel Bender filter runs on the host CPU, not the graphics card! But not to worry, they’re still mighty fast; they’re compiled to native Intel code on the fly. Ah, right, yes, they’ll be slooow on PPC Macintoshes. So it goes.
On After Effects, however, they’ll run on the GPU.
Couple of relevant links:
Adobe Flash 10 beta download
Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit download
Mr Doob, some guy with a lot of cool Pixel Bender examples (found via AEPortal, thanks!)
Pixelero’s cool examples, too (also via aeportal)