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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1176476
Getting On The Ground Level For the TIME project, SeeBoundless traveled to the Amazon rainforest and shot at both the ground and treetop levels, using a Blackmagic eGPU Pro daily to power stitching thousands of images together while on location. Founder Steve Johnson and his team built a mobile AR production and post workflow from scratch, which included drones and ground level cameras. "What we do is much di¬erent than what other companies do with satellites or shooting 2,000 feet above ground. We get right down to ground level, and in this case tree level too, and get hi res, 360 AR models that show every detail. We can bring natural wonders, architectural marvels, breaking news events, historic artifacts (to scale) and works of art into anyone's living room, phone or laptop," said Johnson. "But it is not an easy process. Only a few years ago we would need to shoot on location and bring footage back to a post house or our labs and begin stitching images together. However, the Blackmagic eGPU Pro, attached to our MacBooks, now gives us the extra power we need and allows us to begin stitching millions of image points together right in the field. It is small and easily portable but also packs a lot of extra processing power," he added. The Blackmagic eGPU Pro is an external graphics processor from Blackmagic Design that features the blazingly fast AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics processor. Designed in collaboration with Apple, the integrated design brings cutting-edge workstation-class graphics processing and computational acceleration to customers working in professional video, playing 3D games or using the latest virtual reality (VR) software. Delivering up to 22x faster performance than the built-in graphics on a 13- inch MacBook Pro, the Blackmagic eGPU Pro features a new DisplayPort for connecting 5K displays, two Thunderbolt 3 ports, HDMI 2.0, four USB 3.1 connections, and a built-in power supply that powers the GPU while also providing 85W of downstream power via Thunderbolt 3 for charging laptop computers and powering peripherals. In addition, the Blackmagic eGPU Pro supports Metal graphics technology from Apple, which provides near-direct access to the GPU for maximizing graphics and compute performance with games and applications.