Leaflet

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They might spend a full day in the field shooting,
then retire to a hotel suite and spend the night editing,
mixing audio, and sending rough cuts out for client
approval on an HP EliteBook 8730w Mobile
Workstation with DreamColor Technology.
In the company’s home office, they work on HP Z800
Workstations with eight processor cores rated at 2.4
GHz. “All I know is it has eight cores, renders really
fast, and I’m happy,” Obin says with a wink. It runs
on the 64-bit edition of Genuine Windows Vista®
Business in order to take advantage of 64-bit
processing, and is equipped with an NVIDIA Quadro
FX 4800 video card to optimize image processing and
make best use of the graphics processing unit (GPU).
“In editing, horsepower equals render speed, and
render speed equals time saved,” he says. “The HP
Mobile Workstation is the fastest I’ve seen. With four
cores (in an Intel® Core™2 Extreme processor), I
can finish work on the road. I’m constantly revising
high-resolution work even on my laptop—something
you just couldn’t imagine doing until now.”
“Our future is entertainment production from start to
finish, and the technology advantages we can
leverage—including HP Workstations—will play an
important role in shaping our success.”
Obin Olson, co-owner, Dv3 Productions
In an industry long dominated by Apple hardware for
postproduction, the Olson brothers chose a different
path. In 2007, they bought consumer-grade, quad-core
HP computers and found they were highly stable
and worked well with Adobe® Creative Suite® 4
Production Premium software, their core software
suite. With the move up to HP Z-series Workstations,
Obin Olson says the brothers have the most stable
hardware/software combination he’s ever seen,
along with lightning speed.
“I’ve been cutting one project for three days straight,
with no crashes, no slowdowns, no problems of any
kind,” he says. “That’s unheard of when you’re
working with 2K and 4K files. These workstations
just eat it up.”
To fully appreciate what the Olson brothers are doing
with HP Z-series Workstations, you have to consider
the recent history of digital postproduction. Not long
ago, no one would consider editing production-quality
motion images on a desktop workstation—let alone
a laptop. Instead, high-quality images (either from film
or digital video) would be down-sized in resolution to
standard video for “offline” editing. That reduced the
amount of data to a manageable level for a desktop
computer. An editor would cut and assemble a
piece in standard video, then get it approved by
the customer. Next, the edit decisions would be
captured and used in an expensive, high-end editing
suite (rented by the hour and typically equipped
with powerful servers) to work with the
high-resolution images.
With their HP Z-series Workstations, the Olson brothers
eliminate the “offline” stage entirely. “It’s not about
online versus offline anymore. It’s about what your
machine can render,” says Obin Olson. His brother,
Amariah, reduced the rendering time for one project
from 35 minutes on his previous-generation hardware
to just five minutes on the HP Z800 Workstation.
Windows
®
. Life
without Walls
™
. HP
recommends Windows.
Primary applications
Digital motion imaging postproduction
Primary hardware
• HP EliteBook 8730w Mobile Workstation
• HP Z800 Workstation
• HP DreamColor LP2480zx Professional Display
Primary software
• Genuine Windows Vista® Business 64-bit edition
• Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Production Premium
•LightWave 3D
• Digital Fusion
Customer solution at a glance