It's 6:30pm on a Wednesday evening.  Most of the day's activity is winding down. The phone rings, it's a familiar voice:

"Hey Cutter, it's Randy. I need to take this 1080 PSF footage I have and convert it into five different non-standard aspect ratios that can play in Windows Media Player and encode in VC1.  How do I do it?"

That's just an example of the kind of question Senior Multimedia Engineer, Randy Larsen, of Intel, throws at us frequently. Of course Cutter's answer is, "Why the hell do you need to do that!?! Nobody on the planet will ever need to do that!"  Well, Randy Larsen does. 

Randy Larsen started at Intel in 2000 doing competitive analysis for the Broadband division.  It was his job to evaluate Intel's retail competitors performance to ultimately support sales and marketing.  As a hobby, Randy took to tinkering with different applications, testing their capabilities. One day, one of his colleagues noticed his handy work and his fate was locked.  Randy is probably one of the most crucial, yet unsung, heroes of Intel's Consumer Electronics Group.  A self-proclaimed "World of Warcraft" junky, Randy's job requires him to the test the limits of video content to the corners of the universe where no one dares to venture. His schedule rivals the demand of a Hollywood A-lister, booked eight months in advance with back to back projects.  Pretty much every Intel development group relies on Randy for footage to test their products and as such, development of these products can often depend on Randy's proficiency at his job.

If the XBox 360 developers need to test Intel's chips and need content, they call Randy. If the graphics division needs to test WMP accelerators and need footage, Randy's their guy.  If the satellite Broadcast division needs to test compression.  It's all Randy.  The request will come in to test a certain platform.  He'll give them a battery of audio and video clips in various resolutions and bit rates so in turn, they can exercise standards to make sure everything conforms. He performs these tests on all the main codecs, MPEG, H.264 and more recently VC1.  In addition, he does provides demo content for CES, the Intel developer forum and other public Intel events and/or groups. 

His current project, for the streaming media drivers division (which prompted the above question), involves simulating a TV experience;  you've got an HD TV, some of the channels broadcast in HD but some are in SD. Then you've got different aspect ratios and frame sizes when the content changes from commercial to episodic, or what have you.  Randy's job is to figure out how to to make sure the silicon decoders do the right thing with this big mess of  video.  The tools he's currently testing this out with are; Main Concept video and audio SDKs for H.264 content, ProCoder 3 for source files and Rhozet Carbon Coder. Adobe Premiere Pro is his main editor of choice and he has been utilizing BlueFish's HD Fury for uncompressed video editing and will soon be testing out Matrox Axio. 

It's probably safe to say, when it comes to the wizards of in the world of digital content creation application testing, Randy's our Merlin.