Adobe to add grid features to desktop app

Users of Adobe Systems popular After Effects Professional software know first hand that the bigger project you have with After Effects the more time it takes to for a preview. Well Adobe Systems and GridIron Software are teaming to make this sometimes long process faster by allowing a group of computers to work together thus boosting performance. The guys at InfoWorld have the full story.

Adobe Systems is preparing an update to its After Effects Professional software that will be able to run across a group of computers to boost performance, bringing the concept of grid computing to a commercial desktop application perhaps for the first time. Adobe plans to bundle a plug-in from startup 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. 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 at Grid Technology Partners, a market research company. Development of the Adobe-GridIron software is in progress, and Adobe has made changes to the API of its application to implement GridIron's plug-in, but Adobe was reluctant at this point to say that a grid-enabled version of After Effects is forthcoming.

News source: InfoWorld