Add-on Could Speed Adobe Tools

Adobe Systems is preparing a version of After Effects Professional that can run across a group of computers in order to boost performance, bringing the concept of grid computing to a commercial desktop application for perhaps the first time.

Adobe plans to bundle a plug-in from start-up company GridIron Software with the next version of After Effects Professional, which is used to add special effects to video and other motion graphics. The plug-in will make it easy for users to run a single computing job on two or more computers linked over a network, reducing the time it takes to preview and render effects, says Gord Watts, GridIron's vice president of marketing.

Grid computing has been used most often by academics and scientists for high-performance computing, and recently by companies to enhance server and storage resources. It generally involves linking computers together and using their combined processing power to run computing tasks more quickly.

If Adobe's efforts are successful, other companies selling desktop software for computer-intensive tasks such as video editing are likely to offer similar capabilities with their products, says Ahmar Abbas, an analyst with market research company Grid Technology Partners.

Sharing the Load

GridIron's software takes care of the configuration and management tasks required to run a computing job across a group of computers, work that is too complex for most end users to handle themselves, Abbas says. That capability, combined with today's network speeds, could help make grid computing accessible to everyday desktop users, he adds.

The Adobe-GridIron software is still being developed, and Adobe is reluctant to say for certain that a grid-enabled program is forthcoming. However, prototypes and test results look promising, and Adobe intends to bundle GridIron's plug-in with the next version of After Effects Professional, says Steve Kilisky, Adobe's group product manager for digital video.

Adobe has changed its program's application programming interface to support GridIron's plug-in, although the company has not yet seen the products operating together fully, Kilisky says. GridIron has demonstrated its software's ability to speed the rendering functions of After Effects Professional, but not that program's preview capabilities, according to Watts.

"The potential of using the grid to do rendering as a background process is very compelling. It would allow our users to take jobs they are having to allocate hours to--even [run] overnight--and, by putting more computers to work through the grid, get the work done a lot faster," Kilisky says.

Adobe has signed a licensing agreement with GridIron to use its software pending the successful outcome of the development work, Watts says.

Apt for Adobe Products

Emma Boys, a senior art director with Weldon Owen Publishing in San Francisco, says the technology sounds useful and hopes it will be brought to other Adobe applications soon. She uses Adobe's PageMaker, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat.

"Sometimes I'll be working with a PDF file and want to convert it to some other format, so I have to open it in Photoshop. When I do that, it can take a long time to rasterize," Boys says, referring to the process of converting an image into a pixel-based graphic for editing. "If they could make that happen more quickly, it would be a huge plus."

Watts says users on a gigabit ethernet LAN will see a performance improvement that is almost linear, meaning two computers will run the application twice as fast, three computers will run it three times as fast, and so on. The performance gains will taper off more quickly over slower networks, he says.

GridIron's software will likely be bundled for no additional charge with After Effects Professional, Adobe's Kilisky says. With a single license, users can run the application and plug-in on two processors besides their main workstation--which could be two single-chip PCs or a dual-processor machine, he says. Running the software on additional machines will cost extra, he adds.

Gridiron's plug-in, called XLR8, uses peer-to-peer technology to find other PCs on the LAN that are running the software, then automatically divides up computing jobs and distributes the work. The user does not need to configure or manage the operation, according to GridIron.

Kilisky won't disclose the release date or pricing for an After Effects Professional update, citing Adobe's policy of not preannouncing products. The current release, version 6.0, is priced at $999 from Adobe's online store and was released in July 2003.

More to Come

GridIron's software will come to other desktop applications shortly, Watts says. The company can encode MPEG-4 video using its software, which means XLR8 could find its way into a product like Apple's IMovie, he says, although he declines to comment on any specific upcoming partnerships.

"This is the first of a number of significant customer announcements we'll make over next 60 to 90 days," he says.

Based in Ottawa, Canada, GridIron was founded in 2001 by Steve Forde, its president and chief technical officer, and John Swain, a professor of physics at Northeastern University and a participant in the CERN project, according to Watts. The deal with Adobe is its first significant licensing deal to be announced.

The company's main focus has been on applications that create digital content, because the tasks tend to demand processing power and are often run by a large number of users, he says.

Other software tools can divide the workload of an application across multiple PCs, including some open source products. However, they generally require advanced programming skills and are implemented by developers on a one-off basis for particular applications, says analyst Abbas.

"This will probably be the first time you can go to somewhere like Best Buy and buy a grid-enabled application," Abbas says.