Friday, March 18, 2011

Lost In Neurons Gets Invaded By Boxes

If you've read this blog before, you've probably noticed that the layout has recently been redone. With an updated design system and many more layout options in Blogger since I first created this blog, I decided it needed some sprucing up. This is the result.

The color theme is about the same, but the layout has been modified. Basically, Lost In Neurons now comes with more boxes!

Please, let me know in the comments what you think of the new look.

Monday, March 14, 2011

Inverting Image Brightness

When people first start playing with image editing software, they soon discover that they can invert the color of the image. They'll play around with this for awhile and then move on after their bit of fun.

Last year, I got it in my head that it would be neat to try inverting the brightness of an image without messing with the color. This turned out to be much more interesting than a normal inverted image.

Friday, March 11, 2011

The Youtubes: Return of the Videos

It's the return of The YouTubes, where I share my favorite YouTube videos. This isn't going to be a regular event, but just for when I feel I have a good amount to share.

This post was a blast to write, because I got to go back through my YouTube video favorites and rediscover great videos. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Monday, March 7, 2011

When Multi-core Processors Really Matter

A few years back, when I bought the parts for my current computer, I had a choice to make. Did I want a quad-core processor running at a slower speed, or a dual-core running at a faster speed? Because most programs back then, and many now, weren't mult-threaded, I chose the dual-core for the faster single core speed.

I'm happy to say, it has served me well, and I've barely noticed a hiccup in any programs ever. For most of my computer's life it has never crossed my mind that I should upgrade it. In fact, I've upgraded nearly everything else, but my processor. Recently, I've been thinking that it needs an upgrade.

Encoding Hell

Over the past few months, my processor has started to show its age, but in an unexpected way. Honestly, my current processor would work perfect for most people. However, my demands on my computer have changed, and I've started editing video.

Above is a screenshot of the encoding time of a 26 minute video I edited. It took 5 hours for my computer to put the video together, and that's with me compromising; using only single pass encoding. If I used what I wanted, two pass, it would roughly double the encoding time to 10 hours. That's an incredibly long time to wait for a video to encode, and it has me wishing for shorter encoding times.

Multiply Those Cores

While a lot of programs don't scale well with more CPU cores, video encoding does. The encoding process lends itself well to multi-threading, where each video frame can be processed independently from the others. All good video encoders today use this technique, spreading frames around to be processed by all cores simultaneously.

What this means is that if I upgrade from my dual-core processor to a quad-core, this should theoretically double how many frames are processed per second while encoding. This would half the encoding time. While being twice as fast probably will not happen, I'm convinced it will take at least 2 hours off the shown 5 hour encoding time.