OpenGL Hardware Acceleration

OpenGL is a cross-platform standard for 3D hardware acceleration. It's powerful and flexible as well as fast, but has often in the past only been available in specialized, isolated applications. RED is the first time that OpenGL has been offered inside nearly two dozen NLE's.

OpenGL plays to Red's strengths as the only desktop compositing environment that offers extensive 3D creation and animation tools. No other compositor offers more graphic and effects capabilities, which is why nobody else offers more ways to take advantage of OpenGL than Red.

Red uses OpenGL to draw objects onscreen more quickly than previous display technologies. In many cases, animations are displayed even faster than real-time. That's because the images are displayed using software embedded in display hardware optimized especially for this task.

Users with modern OpenGL cards and more than 32 MB of available texture memory should expect to see many animations, including multiple 3D objects with texture maps, pan and zoom of oversize images, and vector and 3D title animation, all play back instantly. No delays adjusting sliders in the Controls window, no delays when scrubbing in the Timeline window, and no delays when interacting with objects in the Composite window.

In order to support the widest possible variety of display cards, Red offers varying levels of OpenGL acceleration. Red performs a fast background check of OpenGL status on installation and automatically provides the ideal level of OpenGL support based on your specific configuration. These settings may easily be adjusted in the Preview menu, via keyboard shortcuts or in the Red Preferences, on the Render tab.

To use OpenGL, simply open Red and begin working. While working in Draft Quality, everything is displayed to your monitor using OpenGL. This is especially useful when building 3D animations, or even animating 2D objects such as video layers or still images. For example, you can animate the position and scale of a large image and simply press the spacebar to see real-time playback of your pan and zoom animation.

OpenGL offers far more than just accelerated DVEs. Upstream filters with static parameters, such as chroma keys whose values don't animate, are also included as part of these fast OpenGL animations. In fact, an unlimited number of static upstream filters can be stacked without affecting OpenGL performance! Extruded objects including 3D text display materials, lights and shadows, which along with 3D cameras may animate in faster-than-real-time. (Some high-level 3D features such as reflection maps, bump maps and cast shadows do not display when working in Draft Quality. Switch to High Quality to view these.)

Although OpenGL is intended as a preview tool allowing complex animations to be composed more quickly than ever before, it also offers valuable assistance when working at the highest resolutions and quality. Red combines high quality display with OpenGL accelerated previews when moving onscreen objects, adjusting value parameters, and other areas that would previously have required laborious onscreen renders.

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