Things to know to get started – Recording and Editing Videos or Screen Graphics

For demos, promotional videos, user support calls and assessing graphical performance....

Updated 26/05/2020 to add info on Green Screens, lighting, headsets and a few more products plus some specific hints for teachers looking to record lessons

Rob Beekmans recording a video using his DIY Lightboard – details below

How to Record Graphics?

There are lots of scenarios where it is useful to record graphics:

• To make a support call – a quick video can save a tonne of words and confusion
• To assess performance and quality
• To make instructional videos to demonstrate configurations and set-up steps
• To make promotional videos just showing off the pretty responsive graphics

With the advice from colleagues in the VFX, Cloud/VDI and CAD/AEC/CAE industries we’ve put together a few suggestions including many for the budget conscious of solutions you might want to explore. The products are listed in absolutely no meaningful order with no implied rating. It’s a product space with a lot of competition and many of the products recommended were new to especially me. However, in a space with 1000s of products some personal recommendation helped me limit my search.

Open-sourced Virtualized GPU-sharing for KVM

About a month ago Jack Madden’s Friday EUC news-blast (worth signing-up for), highlighted a recent  announcement from AMD around open-sourcing their GPU drivers for hardware shared-GPU (MxGPU) on the open-source KVM hypervisor.

The actual announcement was made by Michael De Neffe on the AMD site, here.

KVM is an open source hypervisor, favoured by many in the Linux ecosystem and segments such as education. Some commercial hypervisors are built upon KVM adding certain features and commercial support such as Red Hat RHEL. Many large users including cloud giants such as Google, take the open source KVM and roll their own version.

NVIDIA GRID: Citrix HDX adds support for Relative and Absolute Mouse Modes to Linux Receiver

Update: 14th September 2016 – Receiver For Windows 4.5 released today now adds support for Windows in addition to Linux!

Just a quick blog to highlight the availability on the Citrix HDX/ICA protocol of a feature enabling Relative Mouse mode. This is a particularly interesting for many NVIDIA GRID vGPU and graphical users as it enables better behavior of certain gaming like applications, particularly those favoured in federal simulations (battle and flight-simulators) e.g Bohemia Simulations VBS 2 & 3. Before on certain application without using an addition gamepad device the mouse could behave strangely ending up with the user pointing their barrel at the ground or sky.

NVIDIA GRID – A Guide on GPU Metric Integration for Citrix XenServer

Just a quick blog aimed at those looking to develop GPU hypervisor monitoring products by integrating the NVIDIA GPU metrics exposed by XenServer via their APIs. Really it’s a bit of a guide as to where to find the information provided by Citrix.

Background

Benchmarking virtualized NVIDIA GRID GPU cards using HPC methodologies! Don’t wear shiny green high-heels in the farmyard!

Follow GRID team’s @AmandaMSaunders and the adventures of the magical GRID shoes!

I’ve been cc:d on a clutch of strange enquiries recently where people are trying to evaluate the NVIDIA GRID GPU cards using HPC (High-performance computing) methods, benchmarks and comparisons. Hypervisors aren’t usually fully compatible with HPC application architecture and as such, although the newest NVIDIA Tesla cards (M60/M6) can be repurposed between a “compute mode” and a specialist “graphics” mode is provided for virtualized graphics designed with hypervisors and graphical application architecture in mind.

The previous (Kepler) generation of NVIDIAGPUs for virtualized graphics (GRID K1/K2) are designed solely for grahical workloads.

NVIDIA M60 GPUs – how they support CUDA, OpenCL and compute in “graphics” mode

Yesterday I wrote a blog about how to configure the M60 / M6 NVIDIA GPU boards for use for “graphics” mode or “compute” mode and how they were designed for different use cases such as VDI accelerated graphics and HPC (high-performance compute) respectively.

This has led to some questions as to whether “graphics” supports compute and CUDA like technologies. The answer is yes!

Mode switching on NVIDIA M60 (GRID 2.0) cards – modeswitch tool

Update (24th Feb 2016): Jason Southern has published an overview and how-to-guide on this tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAQhiNNFXxQ&feature=youtu.be

 

I had an enquiry this week asking what the “modeswitch tool” is and when a user should use it. Basically a GRID 1.0 K1/K2 user had been to a demo of the new GRID 2.0 M60 GPUs. As he hadn’t got M60 boards yet he didn’t have the tool and hadn’t downloaded it (so hadn’t read the very comprehensive documentation that comes with it explain when and why to use it) but he’d remembered some information from the demo and was trying to extrapolate that to his GRID 1.0 K1/K2 cards.

Scalability benchmarking – XenDesktop 7.7 and Windows 7

When I worked at Citrix one of my now colleagues at NVIDIA (Jason Southern) came to us with a proposal and PoC (you can read the blogs about that experiment, here) for us to implement templates to assist users to configure and optimize HDX graphics for XenDesktop and XenApp (Template details – here). XenDesktop/XenApp 7.6 FP3 saw the release of these templates which allowed users to configure their graphics for the specific needs of their users (user experience vs. server scalability) and network conditions (WAN/limited bandwidth etc.).

D3DLive! My favourite CAD event and how to get a ticket for FREE! Now with added NVIDIA magic!

D3DLive! At Warwick University, UK on March 31^st 2016, yet again looks to be pure AWESOMENESS! Every year I blog about why nobody can afford to miss this event and just how amazing it is to attend! Don’t just take it from me – you can read reviews from a number of attendees last year – here.

• Tickets to attend are FREE, but you must be registered to attend and be warned they sell-out FAST: visit DEVELOP3D LIVE here to get your ticket

HDX: Enhanced Support for 3D and CAD Cursors with Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp 7.6 FP3

Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp 7.6 FP3 has introduced enhanced architecture to support both 24-bit and 32-bit advanced cursors. Historically remoting protocols have supported simpler cursors but with an increase in the use of complex and larger cursors for complex CAD and 3D applications, Citrix has introduced a new architecture to support such cursors on-going.