Adobe Systems is preparing an update to its After Effects Professional software that will be able to run across a group of computers to boost performance, bringing the concept of grid computing to a commercial desktop application perhaps for the first time. Adobe plans to bundle a plug-in from startup company GridIron Software with the next version of After Effects Professional, which is used to add special effects to video and other motion graphics.

The plug-in will make it easy for users to run a single computing job on two or more computers linked over a network, reducing the time it takes to preview and render effects, said Gord Watts, GridIron’s vice president of marketing. If Adobe’s efforts are successful, other companies selling desktop software for compute-intensive tasks such as video editing are likely to offer similar capabilities with their products, said Ahmar Abbas, an analyst at Grid Technology Partners, a market research company. Development of the Adobe-GridIron software is in progress, and Adobe has made changes to the API of its application to implement GridIron’s plug-in, but Adobe was reluctant at this point to say that a grid-enabled version of After Effects is forthcoming.

News source: InfoWorld