Ambush underway
BC. And now - THOSE questions. Can you explain how it is that Canopus Storm still doesn't fully support Adobe Premiere Pro, and whether it ever will?HY. The key thing is that with Adobe's software development kit (SDK) for Premiere 6.5, we could remove any Premiere features and put in our own - that has not the case with the SDKs for Premiere Pro.
Adobe was focussing on software effects with Premiere Pro. Some transitions in Premiere Pro are done in RGB, others in YUV - contrary to what Adobe says, which is that they're all done in YUV.
Those sort of inconsistencies make it difficult to properly develop effects that do work consistently and meant we are unable to use all of our own effects - instead of Premiere's - as we did before Premiere Pro.
So, the support that Canopus provides for Premiere Pro is for in/out and basic hardware but NOT Canopus's own effects - and when people talk about our supporting Premiere Pro, they're talking about using Canopus's own real-time effects.
We could not explain and make public about all the issues we found with the Premiere Pro SDK - which is very poor; the features of the SDK are not properly tested by Adobe.
PremierPro targeted to have the best performance with OHCI without going through the SDK functions. In PremierPro, there are two main deta processing flows. One is in OHCI mode, the other is with the SDK functions. SDK functions weren't tested, since they don't use them internally in software mode.
Adobe has a policy called "Open HD" and intends to sell Premiere Pro installed in big-brand PCs using OHCI [not dedicated third-party video hardware]. And that's silly, really, when Adobe doesn't even have any HD Codecs of its own!
BC. Sorry, I probably should know about that but I don't. I'll check up on it and try to include something in the article.
Well, I did just that. First I checked to see if Adobe itself had ever sent me anything about Open HD, but it hadn't. Then I googled for a bit and all became clear. For those who want to see for themselves this is a good starting point.
Pretty soon after I started, I formed the opinion that Open HD is little more than a self-serving cartel - but dressed up as a way of giving peace of mind to customers who are promised there will be compatibility between hardware, software and OS. In addition to Adobe, the other members are Microsoft, Intel, Dell and HP.
Rightly or wrongly, I'm presuming that the five companies believe that the mutual grooming that goes on will help them grow market share at the expense of rivals not operating under the protective wings of Open HD.
It's almost certainly not unlawful, but doesn't seem to do much to encourage the development that comes with genuine competition, and isn't I guess, the sort of thing that will gain any of the five Brownie points from European or US anti-competitive bodies.
BC. Why is re-installation of DVStorm such a tedious business? I'm told that it involves the user in something like 16 separate steps. Why can't all the patches and add-ins be rolled into one unified installer?
HY. It's definitely not 16 steps. The problem is that the options we offer to the user dictate what they do or do not install.
BC. Why does Canopus use its own Codecs, rather than the latest DirectX video libraries? Can you see that situation changing any time soon?
HY. I'll tell you an interesting little story before I answer that. Back in the early days we developed a software JPEG decoder that could put an image on screen in three seconds where previous software had taken three minutes. We showed this to Bill Gates, hoping to sell the software to Microsoft, but when he realised what was possible, he went away and got Xing to do it and to license it to him for free.
Okay, why not DirectX? It has too many bugs. In its early versions it was impossible to get good audio/video synchronisation, and it remains very hard to do that still. And that's why we still put sound functionality into our video editing boards. If you use the PC's sound card it's just too difficult to get A/V synchronisation – you can't detect what stage the sound card is at during monitoring.
