Kevin Goldsmith

June 7, 2009

speaking on Thursday at SeaFlex meeting

Just a note for Seattle folks: I'm speaking at the Seattle Flex User's group meeting on Thursday.

More info: http://seaflexug.org/

June 4, 2009

Some recent Pixel Bender presentation recordings

This week Paul Trani gave a talk on Pixel Bender for Flash, After Effects and Photoshop to Adobe User Group managers and admins. He was a great speaker and really funny. That recording is here.

At the 2009 Creative Suite Developer Summit. I gave a talk on the features of Pixel Bender that are important for doing Photoshop or After Effects filter development. That recording is here. You'll have to excuse my stammering, I had a major slide malfunction (inadvertently used a way early version of my slide deck).

We also had a really fun event, The Pixel Bender Iron Chef contest where developers from After Effects and the Adobe Image Foundation team challenged attendees in feats of Pixel Bender strength. That recording is here.

May 21, 2009

Adobe Romania Sponsors Pixel Bender contest for BEST

Mihai Pricope, a platform evangelist from Adobe Romania posted about this on his blog.

Adobe Romania helped sponsor the 2009 Bucharest Best Engineering Competition for the Board of European Students of Technology. Miti taught introduced the students to Pixel Bender and below you see what they produced two hours later. He has a zip of the pixel bender kernels on his blog.

May 14, 2009

Editing Pixel Bender in Eclipse with PBDT

I've often been asked if Adobe was going to do an eclipse plug-in for Pixel Bender. It's been something that we definitely wanted to do, but I wasn't sure when we would get to it. Joa Ebert decided to take advantage of the PBUtil command-line application that we ship with the Pixel Bender Toolkit SDK to create his own eclipse plug-in, PBDT. He even came up with a way to get Pixel Bender development working with Linux (another often requested feature).

I've been playing with it a bit (it integrates with Flex and FDT pretty well) and it is a cool alternative way to do Pixel Bender development.

Thanks to Joa for his contribution to the community!

April 19, 2009

video of my talk to the Seattle Flash User's group last June

I spoke to the Seattle Flash User's group last June, and I hadn't realized that they'd posted video of it until just now...

Live Videos by Ustream

April 3, 2009

Pixel Bender Toolkit v1.5 released!

The newest version of the Pixel Bender Toolkit has been released on Adobe Labs. This is pre-release 6, but it is also version 1.5. This new version includes the ability to edit, compile and run Pixel Bender Graphs (supported in Photoshop and After Effects). It also has a number of bug fixes, specifically in areas around PBJ generation.

You can get it from the Pixel Bender Technology area on Adobe Labs, and please let us know about any issues or suggestions for the next release in our forums, our Adobe Group or on twitter.

April 2, 2009

More Cool Pixel Bender Experiments

Ralph Hauwert wanted to see what he could do with Pixel Bender and Alchemy to get the most possible performance from the Flash Player. He created this experiment showing a 3D particle system using over 300,000 particles rendered in 3D in real time. More info and the demo on his blog.

Rob Skelly has a post on his blog showing how to use Pixel Bender for general purpose math. "So, does using Pixel Bender for math really help? Yes! In my simple tests, using Pixel Bender for collections of Numbers larger than a few hundred is at least 3x as fast and much better still for larger sets and more complex calculations. There is some overhead associated with setting up the shader objects, but depending on what you’re doing, the savings are definitely worth it."

Tom Beddard (the creator of the Esher Droste effect and the sweet Mandelbrot renderer in Pixel Bender) has dropped some new Pixel Bender coolness with a landscape raytracer! This is pretty neat and he also includes the source and some background on how he created it. Very nice.

Frank Reitberger has created a very trippy sphere generator with Pixel Bender and also includes the sources and a demo on his blog.

Aaron Conran decided to see what he could do using Pixel Bender, AIR and Explorer. The result is the Pixel Bender Explorer application. It also allows you to reference pbj files as effects in the wild to play with them. This app is a ton of fun.

David Lanaert has been experimenting with physical simulation in Flash using Alchemy and Pixel Bender. He created an web app called Farbe that lets you do watercolor simulation in Flash using Pixel Bender. It is really impressive, especially the performance he achieved. Really inspiring to play around with!

Thanks to everybody in the community who continues to push the bounaries using Pixel Bender. We have some very exciting stuff that we're working on that will help you create a whole new generation of awesomeness! Stay tuned!

March 2, 2009

Open position on the AIF team

My team is hiring! We're looking for a white-box QE with C++ and scripting experience.

For more information: http://cooljobs.adobe.com/frameset.html?goto=er-viewjob&refnode=440636

February 13, 2009

NVidia's Pixel Bender contest update: You've got two more weeks!

The NVidia Pixel Bender contest was extended to the end of February. You've got two more weeks to submit your filters for some pretty sweet prizes!

More info in my previous post or go straight to the contest page on the NVidia website!

Great Pixel Bender instructional videos on Adobe TV

Ryan Taylor presented at the Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco last November on Pixel Bender. I didn't get to see it because I was teaching the tutorial at the same time, so I was really looking forward to watching the video. It is finally up! I'm really impressed because Ryan got a lot of the info at the very last minutes (it was changing right up to MAX) and still put together a great talk. There are a couple of minor errors in it on some of the background, but nothing major. Unfortunately, the recording gets cut off, but it is still a good talk if you want to get a good view of Pixel Bender for CS4.

Lee Brimelow (who also created the great Pixel Bender tutorials at gotoandlearn.com) has a good shorty tutorial as part of the ADC Presents series and does a really nice walkthrough of a Pixel Bender kernel. It's basically the 10 minute condensed version of the Pixel Bender tutorials we did at MAX.

Paul from Flash Downunder also does a great tutorial on using Pixel Bender in Flash as well that goes into a bit more depth.

January 16, 2009

Some cool experiments with Pixel Bender

Since the first posting of the Pixel Bender toolkit, developers have been pushing the boundaries, moving beyond image and video processing filters. Some really cool things have been posted, so I thought I would call attention to some of the things I've seen. There is a ton more out there to check out, this is just some of the things I've seen posted lately.

David Lenaerts has created a smoke/fluids simulation in Pixel Bender utilizing 49 Pixel Bender kernels per frame! Also, he has posted the source, which is always cool.

"the chuck" has created a sawtooth synthesizer in Flash using Pixel Bender to generate the waveforms.

Joe Cutting has created a wind tunnel simulator using Pixel Bender.

Mike Welsh created a cool ray tracer in Pixel Bender and was cool enough to post it in the Pixel Bender exchange.

Tom Beddard has posted a really pretty Mandelbrot generator in the Pixel Bender Exchange.

There has been literally a flood of cool posts on people's blogs about Pixel Bender, in the future, I'll try and collect more links to show you here. We're pretty busy working these days on the next gen of cool stuff for you to use... :)

December 23, 2008

NVidia hosting a Pixel Bender writing contest!

NVidia is really jazzed about the way that Pixel Bender shows off their GPUs in After Effects and in the Photoshop Pixel Bender plug-in. So much so that they've decided to hold a contest to see what Pixel Bender filters you guys can think up!

There are some really sweet prizes including an Alienware Area-51 PC and NVidia cards ('natch). I know I've seen some pretty killer stuff that you guys have been posting to your blogs and to the Pixel Bender Exchange. Now is your chance to really show off!

Here is the info from the press release:
NVIDIA Hosts Adobe Pixel Bender Creation Contest
NVIDIA and Adobe are joining forces to encourage artists and developers to write Adobe Pixel Bender™ Kernels for Adobe Creative Suite 4. The first place winner will receive an Alienware Area-51 Personal Computer. Category winners will receive a NVIDIA Quadro CX graphics card. The categories are coolest Pixel Bender kernel, most useful Pixel Bender kernel in the Adobe Photoshop® workflow, and most technically compelling.

Pixel Bender is a technology created by Adobe that enables a new way of enhancing and adding functionality to Photoshop and other Adobe applications like Adobe Flash and Adobe After Effects. The Adobe Pixel Bender technology delivers a common image and video processing infrastructure which provides automatic runtime optimization on heterogeneous hardware. You can use the Pixel Bender kernel language to implement image processing algorithms (filters or effects) in a hardware-independent manner without having to work with each application’s plug-in SDK. The Pixel Bender graph language is an XML-based language for combining individual pixel-processing operations (kernels) into more complex Pixel Bender filters. The most recent version of the Pixel Bender plug-in (1.1) for Photoshop CS4 was recently released by Adobe and is accelerated by the graphic processing unit (GPU).
More information on Pixel Bender can be found here.

The contest runs from January 1, 2009 to January 31, 2009.

Contest details here

Interview on Pixel Bender from MAX Milan

Michaël Chaize filmed this interview with me at MAX Milan. It is sort of a quick intro to Pixel Bender.

Materials from our MAX "Creating Effects With Pixel Bender" Lab

For those of who couldn't make it, I'm happy to post up the exercises and slides from our "Creating Effects With Pixel Bender" Lab that was presented at MAX 2008 in San Francisco and Milan. The feedback from the lab was great, thanks to all who attended!

The goal of this lab is not to make you a Pixel Bender whiz, but to get you started. It is assumed that you know your way around Flash Authoring a bit and that you are at least familiar with ActionScript. No Pixel Bender or image processing knowledge is assumed (that is what the lab is for!). A lot of people who took the lab had been a bit intimidated by Pixel Bender, but realized that it is very easy and fun to play with.

In order to go through this lab, you need to have Flash Professional CS4 installed. If you don't have it on your computer, you can download a trial here. You also need the Pixel Bender Toolkit. If you purchased Flash, it should already be installed. If you don't have the Pixel Bender Toolkit, you can install it from here.

You can download the presentation slides from this link: Download file. Without us talking, they may not be that useful, but I'm posting them anyway.

You can download the exercises from this link: Download file.

A big thanks to Lee Brimelow from whom I liberally stole when writing the exercises and to Bob Archer and Brian Ronan, who helped me write the slides and who co-taught the class with me in San Francisco.

November 20, 2008

Kerry Garrison demos the Pixel Bender Gallery Plug-in for Photoshop

Pixel Bender Demo from Kerry Garrison on Vimeo.

He gets the name wrong a few times, but it is a nice video anyway :)

November 16, 2008

New Pixel Bender releases for MAX!

Hey everybody! I've been laying a bit low for a little while because the team has been heads-down preparing for MAX and polishing our latest releases.

It seems crazy that only around a year ago we first announced Pixel Bender publicly! At that time we were only taking about Flash, although we had been working to make Pixel Bender plug-ins work with After Effects and Photoshop (John Nack had an excellent hint on his blog that day). This year, we're doing a 90 minute lab on Pixel Bender every day and there are two additional Pixel Bender sessions from the Flash developer community! I'll also be doing the lab twice in Milan at MAX Europe.

Tonight, we posted a new release of the Pixel Bender Toolkit, version 1.1. This version is newer than the one that shipped with CS4. There are some bug fixes and a great developer guide and reference put together by the developer documentation team. Also included is the promised Pixel Bender command-line compiler, PBUtil. Those of you using other tools or looking to automate your Pixel Bender workflows can use it, and those who want to create 3rd party tools can use it for both kernel and bytecode compatibility.

The most important release tonight is the Pixel Bender Plug-in for Photoshop Cs4. It supports both Pixel Bender kernels and Graphs and is accelerated for both GPUs and multi-core CPUs.

You can now use the same Pixel Bender filter in Photoshop, After Effects and Flash!

All of these releases are now available from our new labs page:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/pixelbender/

Don't forget:
The Pixel Bender Exchange: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=productHome&exc=26&loc=en_us
the Pixel Bender Forum: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/categories.cfm?forumid=72&catid=661&entercat=y
Pixel Bender on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pixelbender

For those at MAX SF: Brian Ronan, Bob Archer and I are will be at the Meet The Team session for the Flash team tomorrow night. Come by and say hi or find us in the halls of Moscone or the Marriot! We always want to find out what folks are doing with Pixel Bender! Unfortunately, all of the labs are full, but we will post our content after all the MAXes are over.