However, while it is not possible to get the hardware accelleration normally available from the GPU, it is still possible to use vReveal to clean up shaky, low-contrast videos. It just takes longer since it will be processed by the CPU instead of the GPU. Much longer — in some cases it can be up to 20Xs slower on the CPU. But if you have the time, it can be done with just one click of a button.

While investigating CUDA, I was bemused to see a whitepaper in the Nvidia CUDA Zone called “Fast N-body Simulation with CUDA”. If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you may recall an item I wrote about a year ago, called Virtual Worlds Galore, that included a video made by the guys at Genkii in cooperation with the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, or MICA, on this subject. Apparently n-body simulations are all the rage now that desktop computers are capable of displaying them, thanks to virtualization and graphics acceleration architectures like the Nvidia CUDA. They’re a bit over my head, since I’m neither an astrophysicist nor a 3D visualization expert, but its fascinating to follow what’s being done by people who are. And it is more than a little interesting to see how so many of the topics I cover are connected one way or another in unexpected ways.

The problem I was trying to correct is that the video card emulator in VirtualBox 1.5 was not up to handling a high-end graphics task like video editing. Version 3 does a much better job, especially after I read the User Manual (gasp!) and followed the suggestion there to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions, a package of device drivers and applications designed to optimize the guest operating system’s performance. It did indeed do that. Before installing these Guest Additions, I was unable to resize the window where Windows 7 beta was running, and when I clicked the cursor inside that window it was “captured” by the VirtualBox application until I tapped the “Host key” to release it. With Guest Additions installed, I can stretch the display window as large or small as I want it, and the cursor moves smoothly from one OS to the other without requiring a keystroke to release it.

There are a few other enhancements as well, including shared folders, which allow access to any designated folder on the host system, time synchronization between host and guest systems, and of course better graphics support.

So, with all that, does vReveal run? Yes! So, I will be testing it using some videos I’m shooting on my new iPhone 3GS, and will have some before and after examples here soon. It still might not work, because even though the application did open, when I tried to look at a sample video I got an error saying it could not find a compatible GPU (Graphic Processor Unit). Even though the iMac has an nVidia GeForce GT 130 on board, the Windows 7 installation may not be able to take advantage of it if the correct drivers are not available. Cross your fingers!

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: