Using the new Microsoft Surface Laptop Ultra

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Microsoft’s newest hardware release is the Surface Laptop Ultra, which is a high-end 15″ laptop, based on NVidia’s new RTX Spark platform.  This SparkN1X unified system on a chip is an ARM processor, which it has in common with previous SnapDragon based Surface Pro’s, but that aspect is new to me, as someone who has never used Windows on ARM.  This is also a much more powerful ARM processor than the Qualcomm chips that have come before it, with more cores, bigger GPU, and greater memory capacity.  The SparkN1x can share up to 128GB of DDR5 RAM between the CPU and GPU, allowing processing of large AI models, or lots of applications at once.
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Grace Blackwell for Windows-NVidia’s New RTX Spark

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I had the opportunity to attend NVidia’s “Editor’s Day” in San Francisco last week, in preparation for the launch of their RTX Spark line of laptops and desktops.  It was a day of presentations about AI, and how the new hardware enables local AI processing, and the benefits of that shift.  NVidia is very good at creating a market for its products.  It did this with 3D gaming in general, various technologies within it, including Ray tracing, DLSS, etc.  It did this with CUDA and eventually GPU accelerated AI in general.  Now they are doing it with local on-device AI.  One of the major hardware limitations for running complex AI models is RAM.  Unified memory architectures provide flexibility, allowing GPUs access to up to the entire capacity of the system memory, which in turn opens up more AI model options. 
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The Move Towards ARM

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There have been a lot of developments and announcements related to ARM based processing, and it is worth diving into what that means when examining the direction that digital content creation is moving.  At the beginning of 2020, x86 processors ruled the marketplace.  Both Windows and MacOS ran exclusively on x86 processors, Playstation and XBox systems were both x86 based, and most Windows and Linux servers were x86 based.  The x86 name is based on Intel’s CPU naming in the 90s, the 286, the 386, and the 486.  Pentium would have been the 586, but courts determined that Intel couldn’t trademark a number, so we have had name based branding since then: Celeron, Xeon, Centrino, Core, etc.  AMD and other clones used the same instruction sets, to be compatible with programs designed to run on Intel CPUs, so that form of instruction set came to be known as x86 compatible.  The main alternative is ARM, which is what all Android phones are based on, and now many other things.  ‘ARM’ stands for Advanced RISC Machine, and ‘RISC’ stands for reduced instruction set computing.  Reduced instruction set means to break complex instructions down into smaller simpler tasks before processing them, and is just a different approach to handling the complex computations that computers are used for.
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IBC 2026 Announcements

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The International Broadcasters Conference is happening in Amsterdam this week.  Unlike my annual trips to Vegas for NAB nearly every year, I have never actually been to the event in Amsterdam.  But occupying the opposite end of the calendar from NAB, this is the other time when most video technology related companies announce or release their new products, so there are always lots of things to check out and learn about during this time period.  I always try to track these updates and announcements from afar, and these are the ones that stood out to me this year.
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My Experience at NAB 2026

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I spent Sunday and Monday at the NAB conference in Las Vegas.  (That is how I recommend seeing it, the conference is too big to see it all in one day, but four days in Vegas can drain your soul;) I saw all sorts of interesting things in the exhibition halls, many of which I detailed in my earlier article.  I attended alone, instead as part of a larger team, but after 20 years of trade shows, I am constantly running into familiar faces, some of whom I only see at the show.  There were apparently 58K other people there, but nearly half were first time attenders.  I spent most of my time in North Hall, which is focused on software applications, and the computers that run them.  West Hall is mostly enterprise and cloud based workflows, and Central Hall is where all of the production gear and other hardware is on display.

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NAB 2026 Announcements

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This year’s NAB Conference is being held in the North, Central, and West Halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center, from Sunday to Wednesday of this week.  After spending a day perusing the show floor, these are the things that stood out to me, which people may want to go further explore on their own if they have the opportunity.  Most of these booths can be found in North Hall, but the camera companies (Sony, Red, GoPro, Panasonic, etc.) are all in Central Hall.  If you are not attending the show in person, much of the same info can be found online, but there is some value is seeing and feeling things in person, and talking face to face with the people who create and support the products you use.
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Adobe releases Premiere and After Effects 2026

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Adobe has finally released the 2026 versions of Premiere and After Effects.  I say ‘finally’ tongue in cheek because we are only 3 weeks into 2026, but historically they have released the new versions the preceding October, as part of MAX.  This year the release coincides with Adobe’s presence at the Sundance film festival in Park City Utah, where a vast majority of the entries were created using their Creative Cloud products.  I have no problem with the shift in release date, but it is good to know when to expect it.  The other welcome change is the dropping of the ‘PRO’ from the ‘Premiere Pro’ name.  Now it will, once again, be known just as ‘Adobe Premiere,’ like it was until 2003.  I for one can appreciate the simplicity, and the lack of pretension.  There are a number of new features in both Premiere and After Effects that are worth mentioning.
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Adobe Firefly Video Updates

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I have been playing with Adobe Firefly more the last few months, ever since Adobe MAX, inspired by some of the things I learned there.  I have learned a number of interesting things from that experience, and Adobe has introduced a number of new features recently that are worth noting.  The main things that have been recently added are Topaz’s generative up-res for video, and Runway’s Gen 4.5 video model.
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My Experience at Adobe MAX 2025

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I attended Adobe MAX at the LA Convention Center last week.  This is my 6th time at MAX, and it has been interesting to see the event evolve over the years.  This year’s primary focus was clearly on AI tools, both Generative AI, and AI agents.  I had used Adobe’s existing Firefly tools to a limited degree over the past year or two, but never really dove into them, which I do intend to do now that they have matured so much in the most recent release.
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Adobe Shows Off New AI Tools at MAX

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Adobe’s creativity conference MAX took place at the LA Convention Center this week.  This is the event that launches the next generation of Creative Cloud applications every year, and ten thousand users from all over converge at MAX to learn about the new tools that are being released.  The main event ran Tuesday to Thursday, with the Tuesday morning Keynote presentation broadcast across the internet with all of the main announcements.
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