Speaking at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit – June

If you are planning on attending the AMD Fusion Developer Summit in Bellevue, WA in June, come see me talk about Pixel Bender (probably for the last time!) with Bob Archer. Here is the description of the session:

Pixel Bender is a domain-specific image processing language created by the Adobe Image Foundation, and includes a runtime designed to work well across heterogeneous hardware, scaling efficiently for multiple cores. This runtime currently ships in a number of Adobe’s flagship products. Bob Archer, Technical Lead, and Kevin Goldsmith, Engineering Manager, will talk about the design of the language, compilers, and runtime. They will also discuss how the Adobe system can incorporate complimentary technologies like OpenCL and can scale to accommodate new hardware paradigms like the AMD Fusion processors.

Hope to see you there!

A Couple New Pixel Bender Links

Frequent contributor to the Pixel Bender forums, Royi Avital, has released a new set of After Effects and Photoshop plug-ins written with Pixel Bender under the name Flixel Plugins. The first three are now available on aescripts.com

Flixel Plugins on aescripts.com

ApexVJ is a really beautiful Flash-based music visualizer that uses Pixel Bender

Simo Santavirta, the creator, wrote an article on his blog about it.

Moving on…

After many happy and productive years working on Pixel Bender and the Adobe Image Foundation, I’ve decided to take on some new challenges. I’m still at Adobe, but I’m now building a new team and launching a brand new product in the Photoshop family. I can’t say too much yet, but I will have news soon. I’ll still be posting about Pixel Bender stuff here (I’m still a very enthusiastic user!), but for the newest news, you should now also watch the official Pixel Bender blog.

Pixel Bender Synthesizer Experiment

The subject of using Pixel Bender for audio processing on the Flash platform comes up a lot. Audio processing is very processor-intensive and math-heavy, so it would seem natural to leverage Pixel Bender to improve performance of audio within a SWF. At some point, last year, I was talking to Justin Everett-Church about doing a demo for Flash Player 10.1 multi-touch features. A synth seemed like a good idea, and it would let me kill two birds with one stone. So I coded up a synth (with a lame Flex UI) and Justin took that and made it pretty and added multi-touch support. That 2nd part of the demo never worked out the way we meant it too (missed the MAX 2009 keynote by this much). After that, I planned on cleaning up the code and posting it, but I got busy shipping CS5 and well, 7 months later, I finally got around to posting it. Right now it is just the playable demo with the crummy Flex UI.

It is a total processor hog, on purpose. I basically wanted to use it to push the limit of what could be done in the player, so I kept adding more filters and processors to it until the audio started to break up on my Core Duo 2 Mac Book Pro and then stepped back just a little. It turns out that you can actually do a ton of audio processing interactively in the player leveraging Pixel Bender. This was also designed to run as an AIR app, which means that if you really want to play with it, close all your other tabs. Really.

UI for synth

Pixel Bender Synth Experiment
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