We have high hopes for the Adobe Flash Player 10.1, now available in beta form for Windows, Mac and Linux. The new version is shaping up to be a winner in early testing; it appears to be vastly better about memory consumption and not putting my XP-based workstation’s CPU into a race condition (aka, “becoming a runaway process”). I’ll see how well it works on a 64-bit Win7 setup in a couple of hours.

AMD and NVIDIA have also both put out press releases indicating that a number of their graphics processors will play nice with Flash 10.1, which exploits both Stream and CUDA technology (respectively), and can also eke out a bit more video performance from Intel and Broadcom’s integrated chipsets as well.

Why care? Well, you have to use Flash for pretty much any web site you go to anymore, regardless of the scope of the web site. And Flash is the most popular way to show video online these days, and it’s not too hard to see why–it makes things simple. There’s no mucking through video codecs, because all of the necessary codecs for living in Flash-land are included in the Flash installer. And the codecs in question (Sorenson Spark, On2 VP6 and VP7) are all pretty good performers. And the paranoid (but nice) copyright cartel loves it because it’s relatively easy and pretty much seamless to the end-user to apply DRM to Flash video. (You didn’t really want to download that video, did you? You did? Oopsy.)

If you want to take the 10.1 plunge, Adobe’s release notes warn you to remove your existing Flash players before installing the Flash 10.1 beta. Let us know how your experience goes.

Next: waiting patiently for the 64-bit version of Flash to hit Windows…

NVIDIA has just released it’s new Quadro CX graphics card. It’s been designed in conjunction with Adobe to specifically accelerate certain features of the recently announced CS4 suite. I attended an online demo yesterday and the technology involved looked very impressive.

The Quadro CX allowed very fluid interaction with your content in Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere. Many of the simple tasks, such as resizing and rotation were instantaneous, and certain time consuming tasks such as h.264 encoding were greatly accelerated. The Quadro CX is squarely aimed at Adobe professionals, where time is money. We hope to get one in soon to test out for you.

The card itself has 1.5 Gigs of graphics memory and is priced at $1,999, and has drivers for both XP and Vista. A Mac version is currently “under discussion”.

You can read more details in the press release below:

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Apple has released new notebook computers and a brand new HD display today.

The new MacBookPro has a 15” LED backlit screen, making it more power efficent, brighter, and thinner than the standard flourescent backlit screens. Another selling point of this model is that the case is machined from a solid piece of aluminum, making it more rugged and solid for location use. There are two graphics processors included in the MacBookPro, The NVIDIA 9400M is an embedded graphics design that runs when you’re doing normal computer tasks, and is more power efficent. The second is the high end NVIDIA 9600M GT, that kicks in when you’re using heavy graphics software such as video editing, or motion graphics software.

One interesting hitch for video editors is that this new model comes without a Firewire 400 port. Only Firewire 800 has a jack on the side of the computer. Firewire 800 is backward compatible with 400, but you will now need a special adapter to make the notebook work with your Firewire camcorder.

The price starts at $1,999, and you can add options from there, available immediately.

Apple has also released a new version of their consumer notebook the MacBook. This new model is spec’d and priced lower than the MacBookPro, at $1,299, but due to the fact that this model only has the integrated graphics chip (NVIDIA 9400M), it makes it unsuitable for video editing purposes. It also has no Firewire port of any kind.

Apple also unveiled a new 24” LED backlit Cinema Display. It has 1920×1200 resolution, making it acceptable for displaying HD video. However, interestingly this monitor only has a mini-display port (no DVI/HDMI) and so it too requires an adapter to work with anything other than these new laptops that were released today. It will be available in November for $899.