Elemental Accelerator speeds up video production with NVIDIA, Adobe Creative Suite integration

Now, it’s rare for me to touch on traditional software around here. But Portland-based Elemental is doing so well, I couldn’t resist.

They’ve already been getting kudos with Badaboom, their consumer-level product that eases the process of encoding video for iPhones and other mobile handsets. And today, they’re making headlines again with their professional-level product Accelerator, which integrates with both NVIDIA video cards and Adobe Creative Suite.

What does Elemental Accelerator do? I’m glad you asked. Mostly because I would have had to look it up, anyway.

Elemental Accelerator is a video processing solution for creative professionals who need to support an ever-increasing number of output video formats with flat or reduced resources. Elemental Accelerator leverages NVIDIA GPUs to dramatically speed the process of converting commonly distributed digital audio and video formats to H.264 baseline, main, or high profiles. This includes accelerated decoding, processing and encoding of video into high quality H.264 files ready for upload to the web or for burning to Blu-ray disc.

Long story short, less time processing video means more time for doing cool things with video. Or, as Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental puts it (and more eloquently I might add):

“Too often, videographers, video editors and filmmakers have to spend their time waiting for their computer to process video files. Elemental Accelerator lets these creative professionals spend more time bringing their vision to life,” said Sam in a press release. “By leveraging the power of massively parallel GPUs and introducing accelerated decode and image processing to the encoding pipeline, Elemental Accelerator can bring a 2x to 11x performance boost to common video processing tasks in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.”

And, of course, I’m pretty excited to hear it’s available for both Mac and Windows. Sounds like they’re putting that $7 million investment—from just under a year ago—to good use.

For more information, see the blog post announcing Elemental Accelerator (formerly known as RapiHD) or see the press release on Accelerator.

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Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy View all posts by Rick Turoczy