Cleaning up Video with vReveal
Written on July 3, 2009 by admin
I have a chance to review a new, specialized video editing tool called vReveal, just in time to try to fix up some of the shaky vids I’m making with my new iPhone 3GS. But there’s a catch.
vReveal is a MS-Windows® program. Normally this would not be a problem, since I have Windows XP Pro®, Vista® and even the Windows 7® beta operating systems running in virtual machines on my Mac. I use both Parallels Desktop for Mac and Sun Microsystems’ opensource VirtualBox. But my new 24″ iMac apparently has some hardware not supported yet by either of these VM systems, and it’s possible that vReveal itself does not support my video card, even though it’s made by their partner, nVidia (nVidia GeForce GT 130). Maybe upgrading to the latest version of Parallels will help, too.
So, I have some more work to do before I can try out vReveal. Luckily, nVidia has a nifty tool, shown below, that can help locate drivers for their video cards. By having it here in my blog, I can use it from within the various VMs I have running to see if I can get them optimized to take advantage of the nice graphics I enjoy on the Mac OS side. And of course you can do the same; enjoy! The sound card issue may be isolated to Sun’s VirtualBox, and if that’s the case I’ll have to spend some time on the users forum over there to see if I can resolve that issue. But at any rate, here’s the nVidia widget:
July 6th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Hi, Kat,
Unfortunately, none of the popular virtualization software packages like VirtualBox or Parallels support CUDA, which is NVIDIA’s programming architecture that allows vReveal to benefit from the added processing power of NVIDIA CUDA-enabled video cards. (All the CUDA-enabled video cards are listed here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn_products.html As you can see, your GeForce GT 130 is among them.)
Of course, vReveal runs just fine in a virtual environment thanks to your system’s CPU. However, if you’d like to try out GPU-acceleration of vReveal on your Mac, then you’ll want to use Boot Camp.
Here’s the relative performance of different GPUs versus a dual-core Intel CPU. (FYI, your GPU has 32 cores.) http://vreveal.com/gpu
Best,
Mike Sonders
Product Manager
vReveal
July 6th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Thanks, Mike. I think you’ve saved me a lot of beating my head against the wall here. Too bad about requiring Boot Camp to take advantage of the GPU, though. That’s obviously a limitation of the various virtual machine softwares rather than vReveal. Maybe I should try it, but as long as vReveal will run, even if slower, I will probably use the VMs I’ve got Windows installed in for now. Maybe you all will make a native Mac version one of these days, I hope!