"Introducing Apple Afterburner. Blaze through 8K video. Created to transform the workflow for film and video professionals, Afterburner allows you to go straight from camera to timeline and work natively with 4K and even 8K files from the start. No more time-consuming transcoding, storage overhead, or errors during output. Proxy workflows, RIP."
"Afterburner is a hardware accelerator card built with an FPGA, or programmable ASIC. With over a million logic cells, it can process up to 6.3 billion pixels per second and is capable of handling up to three streams of 8K ProRes RAW or 12 streams of 4K ProRes RAW. This means you can free up your cores to enable even more creative effects and processing."
"Up to 3 streams of 8K ProRes RAW video at 30 fps. Up to 12 streams of 4K ProRes RAW video at 30 fps. Up to 16 streams of 4K ProRes 422 video at 30 fps."
That is the information published from Apple.
Their release notes from R3D SDK on 4/23/2019 state:
- Added Metal accelerated image processing through new REDMetal class:
- -Use with AsyncDecoder class. Cannot be used with GpuDecoder class
- -R3DDecoder class not yet supported
RED's quote in the MP7,1 press release states:
“Apple’s new hardware will bring a mind-blowing level of performance to
Metal-accelerated, proxy-free R3D workflows in Final Cut Pro X that editors truly have never seen before. We are very excited to bring a Metal-optimized version of R3D in September.” — Jarred Land, president, Red Digital Cinema
RED isn't mentioning Afterburner. RED is mentioning Metal-accelerated workflows on macOS, that's it.
It'd be fantastic if Apple released an SDK for Afterburner for companies like RED to take advantage of, but there is no evidence that is going to happen.
No demos at Adobe MAX using MP7,1 or XDR display today either. Lots of iPad/iOS "stuff" when using Apple products. Tomorrow's agenda is generally more of the creative inspiration session than anything technical, so unlikely to see much there.