omino pixel blog

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)

Ah! Ah! Yes. Ok. Here’s the rather understated but incredibly-significant feature added in CS4: Pixel Bender effects.

Keven Goldsmith of Adobe explains.

Pixel Bender is Adobe’s way of packaging up (essentially) OpenGL Shader Language, for use as effects plugins to their imaging products.

The outcome will be a lot of extremely cool effects plugins. Some of these will be old effects that run much faster, meaning we can use them more freely. Some of these will new effects that would have been prohibitively slow, but are now merely non-realtime.

This is getting good.

If you tried to download the Windows version of the Omino After Effects Suite and had a negative experience: Please accept my apologies. I jumped the gun on the “release”. Lessons learned (something about DLL’s and testing, thanks).

On the plus side: http://omino.com/sw/ominoAeSuite/ has the fixed download. Confirmed to download and run on 3, count ’em, 3 computers other than my own.

(The only issues were with download/unzip; once running, they are reliable and stable. More stable than Particle Playground ha ha.)

Especial thanks to Mike K at Muonics for dragging me kicking and writhing into the necessary knowledge of manifests, linker choices.

The next release of the Omino After Effects Suite is finally available! Oh, it’s got a fabulous new Kaleidoscope effect, mentioned in the previous post. But the real excitement is… is… is this:

Mac OS X Universal Binary, and Windows! The two most requested features, doncha know.

In truth the Windows version should be considered Alpha. I’m confident that it works and is stable (as is the Mac version) but I’m still learning my way around the compiler settings, so it may run slower than necessary.

Oh, speaking of performance, there’s a handy feature in every single Omino Suite plug-in: a performance measurement.

Under the “debug” twirldown are options to display all the parameters, and the render time. These are both mostly to help me while developing the plugin; stamping the parameters creates a video record of possible outcomes. But the time stamp is actually quite handy while authoring, to give some idea of which settings are likely to take more, well, render time.

I’ll be posting a few more examples of usages of the Omino Suite. Stay tuned.

Note to Adobe. Free idea: show a performance measurement for each plugin. The application knows when each starts and stops and could do that. Sure, confounded a bit by threading, &c, but still.