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Green (and Good) Ideas for EventsMay 27th, 2010The 2010 Event Solutions Conference & Tradeshow, attended by event planners, show operators and industry leaders, is one of the top annual shows in the conference industry. This year, the state of the industry discussion, “Where We Are Now & Where We’re Headed,” was presented by a panel of top industry professionals addressing concerns about design trends, green events, pricing and shortened production times. In addition, educational sessions featured topics such as customer loyalty, green events, social media and more. Trade show riches, green niches The trade show portion of the Event Solutions Conference was, as always, overflowing with new ideas, technologies and trends. Exhibitors showcased such creative event ideas as entertainment-centric presentations, portable ice arenas, the latest display and gaming technologies, and future directions in décor and design. During an exhibitor debriefing session, many noted that new event professionals are continuing to enter the industry, pointing up the power of networking and relationship building.
Real-world solutions for greening events From holding events outdoors, maximizing natural light and leveraging wireless technology to replace printed materials, to reducing food waste and recycling every possible item, green goals were widely discussed at the conference – and used by exhibitors and attendees alike. Many made use of Wi-Fi to reduce the distribution of paper programs, just like CRE can equip conference teams (again, both exhibitors and attendees) with laptop rentals or other devices to save on paper, printing costs and cleanup. CRE is serious about enviro-friendliness, too, as its corporate green statement makes clear. The balance is a tough one to strike – business growth along with environmental stewardship – but it is worth our best efforts. CRE always gives you its best efforts, too, recommending appropriate solutions to your workflow bottlenecks and advising you on everything from technology to outfitting your trade show exhibit booth. Call or e-mail one our Account Executives today, or fill out the online Quick Rental Quote form, and let us help you make your next move towards ‘greening’ your event. Advances in Audience Response SystemsMay 25th, 2010When you need feedback from a marketing focus group, a room full of shareholders or a few score people attending your conference breakout session, that’s where CRE’s Audience Response System rentals (ARS) It is not difficult to get going with the presentation once you have the plug-in installed. It provides a new toolbar that lets you edit professionally-designed templates to your needs. You can change graphics, colors and styles in a few mouse clicks, use the special toolbar to create content fields and choose your settings, quickly and easily. Save your slide, move on to the next one and repeat as needed. Load your finished presentation onto a laptop or desktop computer, then plug into a projector rental, set up your screen and start getting that audience feedback you need. How does interactive polling work? Audience Response Systems offer small response card keypads that are wireless and use both IR (InfraRed) and RF (Radio Frequency) technology depending on the model. With the keypads, the audience can answer multiple choice, multiple response, short answer, essay and alphanumeric questions throughout the presentation. Need to poll the audience from different (even distant) locations in real-time? Now there is remote polling technology that allows a presenter to address and question audiences, either using a web-based polling application (through their iPhone or Blackberry smartphone) or a hand-held keypad. This gives the presenter the capability of combining the remote results with those of the local group. Real-time feedback allows the presenter to keep remote participants attentive and focused by displaying results of their ongoing input. Expanded uses, expanded capabilities Audience Response Systems have proven their tremendous value in a wide variety of settings. No longer do seminars, product demos, breakout session presentations or other corporate meetings have to be one-way streets – someone talks, you take notes – now that true real-time connectivity is easily achieved. The old salesman’s saying, that the best salesmen listen more than they talk, is a powerful insight, and an ARS gives you the ability to listen to hundreds of people at the same time, responding with information that your organization really needs to know. An Audience Response System, being fully plugged into the MS Office applications, makes it easy to tally, analyze and display the gathered information. Ready to interact with your audience at your next meeting? Simply fill out the Quick Rental Quote form, give us a call or send an e-mail and we will take care of you right away. Whether you need audience response, kiosks (another great interactive tool!) or plasma rentals, our objective is to equip you with the best tools available so you can finish on time with excellent results, whatever the task. Unique Input Devices for Animation & DesignMay 20th, 2010Artists working in the digital domain often feel frustrated by the limits of their keyboards. Over the years, alternative input devices like graphics tablets have helped in many ways. Overlay keyboards Another way for artists to streamline and accelerate their workflow is by using overlay keyboards, which date back to the first days of computer use. Typically, the overlay keyboard is a flat grid of buttons, usually unmarked, that is programmed with special software that accompanies the product. After this, a sheet (the overlay) is placed over the keys to identify their functions. The future for these alternative input devices will include touch-screen technology, which is a hot field for R&D right now. Artists using Maya or Pro Tools on CRE Mac Pro rentals can automate entire workflows without writing complex scripts and save valuable time by programming the special keyboards. For example, the Enterpad reduces repetitive keystrokes and automates common tasks, reducing the time, effort and cost of the work. It is plugged in like any other keyboard and plays nice with all your programs. The Enterpad uses no proprietary drivers or special interface, not even when used with DOS. The XKeys unit is a fully programmable key pad that will program shortcuts and record your typing so you can use a single keystroke to generate boilerplate messages, e-mails or correspondence. Digital artists can also customize the XKeys pad to perform elaborate tasks of all kinds, whether they’re using one of CRE’s iMac Rentals or a PC. The time you save using a special keyboard depends on many variables, but there is no question that they aid in efficiency and throughput. On the ‘inputing” horizon In the future, we will be inputting information into our computers with our bodies – eye movements, head positions and the kind of hand and body input already seen in the Wii and other game systems. These are the next devices we will see in computing because of the head start gained in the game industry. The technology is just starting to take off. Voice input is already available, but the technology is limited to taking dictation. True control of the computer will require that voice commands be understood at sentence length, like post-production managers telling their computer rentals to “copy the files, render the cartoon and upload it all to the main server.” The problem is “speaker independent continuous voice recognition.” Even the best software used today, which some say is Dragon Naturally Speaking, still needs to be trained to a particular speaker’s voice, intonation and cadence. When everyone can use the software out of the box, a new age will dawn in human-computer interaction. CRE follows the technology trends so that we can help you be prepared for whatever comes your way. Need mac rentals or render farm for upcoming project? Simply fill out the Quick Rental Quote form and we’ll be on it right away. There’s no time to spare, the future is coming fast! Who Needs a Render Farm? An IntroductionMay 18th, 2010An Introduction to Render Farm Rentals
A frame at a time Rendering times differ according to the medium, the budget and the deadlines. Thus, one frame of TV special effects typically takes from 30 minutes to an hour, while many hours per frame is required for feature films. IMAX resolution – such as rendering the Devastator character in Transformers 2 – can take as much as 70 hours per frame. The solution to this immense computational challenge is a kind of distributed computing where entire banks of networked computers do nothing but render final frames. In a state-of-the-art setup like George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic the artists themselves have some 2000 cores in their workstations, connected to a render farm with almost 6000 processor cores (at the time of Transformers 2). Even a small special effects firm with a half dozen animators will likely have 100+ processors working for them. The maker of the South Park cartoons, South Park Studios, now has a 120-processor render farm with over 30 Mac workstations (similar to Mac Pro rentals from CRE) along with some 10 terabytes of storage using the same technology CRE can provide, Xserve RAID rentals. Do you need a render farm? Compositing, motion graphics work, architectural visualization and digital audio recording can all be accomplished with render farms. If your firm is working in any of these areas, the answer to the question is, “Yes, you need one!” Small studios or companies that don’t have the money to buy the computers they need can use computer rentals for rendering. In the “old days,” there were few options on connecting the devices that make up a render farm. Today, however, many of the leading 3D and compositing software programs include built-in networking/rendering functionality, and some even have a rendering controller. This means that the additional “nodes” (distributed PCs or Macs) can be managed right from your main workstation with a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) arrangement, meaning that you can run them as “headless systems” without a keyboard, monitor or mouse. CRE is an expert in providing render farm rentals and setups to companies of all kinds and sizes. Our Account Executives are up to date on all the render farm specifics, and can get you on your way in no time if you need to set one up. Simply call or e-mail, or complete the Quick Rental Quote form - we’re ready to render assistance. Quick Tips for a Green ConferenceMay 13th, 2010Because of our own commitment to sustainability, we’ve covered a number of green topics in our blog this past year (yes, it’s been a year now), but have discovered one glaring oversight. We never gave you, in one place at one time, a simple action plan or quick overview for having the greenest possible conference. Today, we will address conference exhibitors, but the ideas will be applicable to in-house meetings and events, too. Green is the goal
If you are scheduling a live presentation, the same thing goes for any ”handouts” – make PDFs available for download. (Most conferences these days have onsite wireless set up for attendees’ use.) For feedback on the presentation, forget the paper and pencils again, because Audience Response System rentals will get you much more feedback, and in a form you can immediately put to use on your computer. The presentation itself can be done in several ways, either with projector rentals or large-screen monitors (like CRE’s plasma rentals). You can attach a digital media player or your laptop to either a projector or a LCD monitor, and remotely control the whole thing. More green tips for your conference If you really want to limit your conference team’s paper use, you may want to outfit everyone with tablet PC rentals. This way, the team’s note-taking can be handled with the various “pen computing” tools. Using the stylus and a “notepad” program, you can take digital notes, saving them as-is or converting them in real-time (or later) with character recognition software. A tablet PC, of course, is multipurpose wireless device and can be used to keep team members connected and coordinated, no matter how busy and demanding the conference gets. (Tip: Don’t forget the AC adapter, and plug in the unit at all possible times to keep it charged for those times you need to be “untethered.”) If you need to record a conversation with a potential customer, a keynote speech or a breakout session, digital recorder rentals can provide massive amounts of speech-quality recording time. Again, you will have no consumables, no waste, a low cost and high quality results. Instead of pages of random, unsorted notes (plus the occasional napkin or envelope with someone’s name and phone number), you will leave the conference with a useful collection of digital assets – audio notes, imported/downloaded video, drawings, doodles and handwriting converted to editable text. Always back up your digital assets! In addition to carrying your digital assets out of the convention center on your laptop, you can upload them to your company’s server (or elsewhere) as you go along from session to session, day to day, in a sort of ongoing online backup routine. This is the way to safeguard against loss of your laptop, file or disk corruption or other catastrophes. After planning a Earth-friendly, green conference appearance, the last thing you need is a technological breakdown. Don’t forget to make backup an important part of your strategic planning. CRE’s experienced Account Executives can help you “green” your next conference or event, or set you up with everything from computers to office equipment. Our expertise is yours with a simple phone call or e-mail, or if you know what you need, use our Quick Rental Quote form. We are here to help. Let us know how we can help with your next green event! Tech Trends and Gadgets – 2010 Midyear ReviewMay 11th, 2010It’s not only Google, Apple and Microsoft that are leading the way in gadgets, technology trends, computing and communications. Thousands of small companies are innovating, creating and imagining the future, too. Life-casting In some markets life-casting is already possible. it will become a global trend as more of the world is blanketed with 24/7 cell phone users, who will use high-speed 3G (and 4G) networks to fulfill their craving to connect with others in every imaginable way. New Web sites like Qik.com enable people to stream live video from their cell phones to the Web with no glitches and a dead-simple setup. YouTube clips share captured moments, but are mere video snapshots compared to live streams that deliver real-time happenings. One question: Is everyone’s life really that interesting? Body-controlled video games The Wii devices started the trend, and now all the game consoles are at it. The new Microsoft Xbox controller, with technology called Project Natal, follows your dance moves, ball kicks and bat swings with an infrared camera and displays them on-screen. Voice commands are possible, too. Sony is releasing the PlayStation Motion Controller wand, to do the same thing as your body would (but it’s easier). With advances in remote control technology, we won’t be stuck with the same gamepads or joysticks popularized back in the Stone Age (the 1980s and 1990s). Graphic artists currently using CRE Mac Pro rentals with Wacom tablets should watch for new developments in input technology to grow from these devices. Content aggregators for you Digg.com and similar services help you locate related stories and images online. Others like YouTube let you share silly or serious videos. Toobla.com does both, but for a different reason. It’s an “aggregator,” like the others, but it works with videos, documents, Web sites, photos, images and e-mails, allowing you to store everything “in the cloud” but share it wherever you want. It is not another Box.net, just for storage, as it is made to display and distribute your digital assets. Companies planning a massive archiving project may wish to grab a few large-screen LCD monitor rentals and Xserve RAID rentals to ensure enough storage space – and enough screen real estate to see everything. Satellite tape measures GeoEstimator is a new service that uses satellites to make roof, lot and building measurements that are every bit as accurate as on-the-scene ones. This service promises to save a lot of contractors, estimators and insurance adjustors from possible falls. The same technology is being used to determine property boundaries, estimate public works projects and integrate more satellite data into daily life, including GPS positioning and atmospheric readings. At CRE, we are innovators, too, and keep our eyes firmly fixed on the changing tech landscape. For all your needs, call or send an e-mail to our expert Account Executives, or use the Quick Rental Quote form, and get the latest gadget you need, quickly and easily. Is Adobe Creative Suite 5 a “No-Brainer” Upgrade?May 6th, 2010
Photoshop heaven In the new Photoshop, you can now drag and drop files from the desktop to an open Photoshop window, where they create a new layer, as well as save customized layer styles as defaults, change multiple layers’ opacity/fill simultaneously and lots more. More Adobe magic is on display with the Content-Aware Fill option, which helps you remove unwanted areas or objects quickly. The brush palette got its first overhaul in many moons, and now features realistic tips in addition to a Mixer Brush that turns photos into paintings without filters. None of these upgrades will overwork any modern Mac CPU, but CS5 will only run under Mac OS X 10.6 on an Intel model. That said, it will happily cruise along on a Mac mini and CRE’s iMac rentals, too (until you bog down in 3D work; see below). Other top new tools include a revised Refine Edge function, whose Smart Radius tool makes selecting fur and other ephemera quick and easy, and a Lens Correction filter that uses camera profiles you create or download. The list goes on – and on. This is a massive upgrade, for sure, and Photoshop Extended users even get the new Repoussé (“Rep-oo-say”) tool, which makes 3D versions of paths, text, selections and masks on a special layer where all the program’s 3D tools can be used. Power vacuum in 3D Even on powerful Mac Pro rentals, working in 3D is not a particularly swift process, as there are huge amounts of CPU power needed for the extrusion process. Speaking of 3D, there are other multidimensional features like the new Ground Plane Shadow Catcher, which makes creating realistic cast shadows a snap. A faster 3D Ray Tracer allows pauses in rendering to change quality, and there are tons of new light sources, overlays and new material types in addition to the option to change depth of fields, adjust preferences and more, even as you work. Powerful software, yes – but for this you need hardware power, too, as much as you can get. Adobe even specifies minimum requirements for graphics cards with CS5. Don’t buy without checking this out! Adobe updates appear every year and a half or two, and in a recessionary economy justifying the cost (especially a first purchase) is tough. Numerous reviewers have called the buy a “no-brainer” but this is really true only if you passed on CS4 and are two versions behind. If you don’t work in 3D, but need the rest of the new stuff, stick with the standard version. Which Creative Suite for you? Now there are five different bundles starting with the Design Standard version — standard Photoshop CS5, Illustrator CS5, InDesign CS5, Acrobat 9 Pro, as well as Bridge CS5 and Device Central CS5 — to the top-of-line Master Collection. This bundles Adobe’s best, including Photoshop Extended CS5 with the advanced 3-D capabilities, with the other tools you need to make content (and apps!) for the upcoming Flash Player 10.1. Our Account Executives can give you more information on the hardware you need to run Adobe’s powerful new software. Call, send an e-mail or fill out our Quick Rental Quote form online and we’ll get you set up, promptly and properly, with the solutions you need for the work you do. Graphics Chips Do the Heavy Lifting for Monitor RentalsMay 4th, 2010One area area of interest to many CRE clients is graphics performance. Designers to graphic artists doing Web work, and engineers developing circuit boards, need the best possible graphics processing, as they rely on precision, accurate color and consistent performance. So, what’s new? Not the good old “color card” days In most early computers, you had to specify what “color card” you wanted, first of all. In 1987, the industry settled on IBM’s Video Graphics Array (VGA) as the model for the image output. After trying various adapters and connections, cards were eventually mounted, in most cases, in PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slots. The Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) was introduced in 1997, to offload processing of graphics to a device closer to the core functioning of the computer. What finally evolved was a way in which systems could “share” some of the CPU’s memory, RAM, with the graphics processing circuitry. This model is still in place in low-end computers. Potent PCs like the HP 8600 computer rentals and the awesome Mac Pro rentals have fast graphics processing units (GPU) mounted in PCIe (PCI Express) bus slots for maximum bandwidth. With all the graphics number-crunching (of which there is a lot) happening on a dedicated subsystem, the CPUs in these high-end computers can devote every single clock cycle to doing the unseen work. Onward graphic processors! Like everything else in computers, the graphics processors are getting faster, smaller and more precise. The color performance we take for granted was a far-off dream just a decade ago – and compared to the early computers’ graphics performance, today’s top performers are downright miraculous. With color calibration equipment, artists can certify that their computer is displaying (and their software generating) the precise colors called for in a particular design. Many of those working with high-end graphics today are too young to remember how nearly impossible it was to get color consistent throughout a device chain. The advances in the unseen heavy lifting done by GPUs – combined, of course, with the progress represented by LCD rental, plasma, LED and Apple Cinema Display rental– promises a very colorful, cost-effective future for digital artists of all kinds. Not sure what you need? We work with you to solve production bottlenecks, help plan your conference or convention, deliver the workstations you need to take on more business – and maximize your every opportunity. We’re ready to help, right now. Call or send an e-mail, any time, for a swift and thorough reply – or complete the Quick Rental Quote form if you know what you need. |
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As we head toward the halfway point (yes, already) of 2010, the following services, products, trends and innovations are either available or arriving shortly. Some will be duds, but some may affect your life for years to come.
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Several forks in the road later, there were solutions based on varying customer needs for precise imaging – from “not much” on the low end to “all you can get” at the leading edge – offered by such manufacturers as ATI and nVidia (often all-caps, NVIDIA) which CRE Rentals stocks.
