Adobe to add grid features to desktop app

Adobe is preparing a version of its After Effects Professional software that will be able to 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, said Gord Watts, GridIron's vice president of marketing.

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

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Adobe is preparing a version of its After Effects Professional software that will be able to 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, said Gord Watts, GridIron's vice president of marketing.

Grid computing has been used most often by academics and scientists for high performance computing, and more recently by enterprises to make better use of 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 compute-intensive tasks such as video editing are likely to offer similar capabilities with their products, said Ahmar Abbas, an analyst with market research company Grid Technology Partners in South Hadley, Mass.

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

Development of the Adobe-GridIron software is still in progress, and Adobe was reluctant to say for certain that a grid-enabled version of its software is forthcoming. However, prototypes and test results look promising and it is Adobe's intention to bundle GridIron's plug-in with the next version of After Effects Professional, said Steve Kilisky, Adobe's group product manager for digital video.

Adobe has made changes to the API of its application to allow it to implement GridIron's plug-in, although it has yet to see the products operating together fully, he said. GridIron has demonstrated its software speeding the rendering functions of After Effects Professional, but not its 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 overnight - and, by putting more computers to work through the grid, get the work done a lot faster," Kilisky said.

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

Emma Boys, a senior art director with Weldon Owen Publishing in San Francisco, said the technology sounds useful and would like to see it brought to other Adobe applications soon. She uses Adobe's PageMaker, Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat products.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.