I’ve been doing digital video for a long time and have seen a ton of gear walk through my doors during my time with Adobe and in the field in general.  There have been lots of great improvements over the course of time and I’ve been privileged to help on some of them.  CPU’s have gotten faster and seen more cores, GPU’s have exploded in power, motherboard bus speeds have increased and on and on…

But, we expect this and will continue to do so…

That said, there are very few improvements that make a remarkable difference.  Lets be honest, there’s a ton of fast stuff out there and it’s not often that you get disruptive or revolutionary technology that makes a true difference in your every day workflow.

Well, I’ve had one of those game changers for the past 8+ months and after having it all this time, I now have to tell you that an SSD driveis absolutely one of those crazy, transformative technologies.

The problem with SSD drives in the past has been that they are expensive and not large enough in capacity.  Well, now they are becoming increasingly affordable and the capacity has reached 500GB which makes using it as a boot drive completely plausible.  480GB+ drives are now less than $500.  Intel, Samsung and others are terrific drives and I’ve played with at least a couple of them and had a solid experience with all of them.

If you are an After Effects user and a looking for a way to use that small 80-200GB SSD drive, install it in your system and point your AE cache to that drive and you will see Global Performance Cache go crazy with performance.

Once you go with an SSD drive, all other drives are driving you crazy!  I’ve put a 520GB drive into my Macbook Pro and I have a full desktop experience in less than 10 seconds.  Waiting even 30 seconds now is an eternity.  Using a standard spinning disk for your AE cache drive also yields a vastly slower performance.

In short, the time to make SSD drives your standard is NOW! I’m working to slowly swap them out for all of my demo systems.

I wanted to take what I had done with the NVIDIA Quadro card comparison and apply the same tests to the Maximus card set I have.  Read on, to learn the results.

My previous blog entry is here – give it a read if you haven’t gone through it yet.  To review, I have a HP Z800 that is a couple of years old but still pretty solid all the way around.  For my Maximus test, I took the comparatively lowly Quadro 2000 and matched it up with the Tesla C2075.

If you’ve looked at the Tesla C2075, you’ll notice that it seems like the Quadro 6000.  Well, that’s because it is.  448 cores and 6GB of memory, meow!  There are however, two downsides as I see it.  First is price: While prices on this delicious card are dropping, it is still going to cost you something north of $2,000 as of this writing.  In my opinion, that precludes a lot of potential Premiere Pro customers.  You need to either have a lot of expendable cash or have a real need for it (more on that in a bit).

The second problem is a little more basic.  You need to have a big computer power supply to drive this card.  I wanted to try the Quadro 4000 + C2075, but I didn’t have two separate molex adapters to hook up both of them.  Even if I did, I wasn’t entirely sure that the power supply in the Z800 would be entirely happy with me if I did.  If you’re considering a Maximus configuration, be sure to know what your computer’s power supply is capable of.

The idea of how Premiere Pro uses the Quadro 2000 + C2075 is pretty nifty.  It puts all of the display duties (drawing the screen, the Premiere Pro UI, etc) to the Quadro 2000 and assigns all of the Mercury Playback acceleration to the beefy Tesla C2075.

Okay, enough with the downsides – playing with this GPU combination is just flat out fun.  In addition, the advantages of this card were clear and make sense for a particular type of Premiere Pro user.

Take a look at the spreadsheet graphic here:

* The areas highlighted yellow are data points that show a significant change.

There is no denying that this card offers top performance and offered at least one significant improvement in the area of scrubbing AVCHD.  When you think that AVCHD is H.264 and that so many cameras and devices are going that way, the scrubbing becomes a REAL advantage.  I went from awful to awesome in one shot and that was the biggest surprise of these tests for me.

And while the numbers don’t support it, I feel that the RED workflow was just a bit snappier as well.  RED workflows are really enhanced by CPUs (not a typo), but having the GPU for FX to keep the CPU free is another clear advantage.  Certainly the scrubbing on the RED was better, though it is not as dramatic as AVCHD.  I also really liked the feeling of confidence in that I had a card doing the screen display and another dedicated card fueling Premiere Pro.

Comparing a Maximus to anything other than a Quadro 5000 just isn’t fair.  The Maximus laughs at the Quadro 2000 and 4000.

Where I can see this really being useful is high-end production, specifically with things like RED and other big or temporal type codecs.  If you’re looking at these kinds of workflows and can afford the coin, there’s nothing like it.

Clearly though, this solution is not for everyone.  It’s expensive and if you don’t have a solid P/S, it’s going to set you back even more.  What I’d like to see is NVIDIA and Adobe working together to certify other Maximus combinations that are more affordable to a broad set of Premiere Pro users.  Give me a Quadro 4000 + C2050 or something similar.  I’d love for Adobe users to have a $800 investment in a NVIDIA card and then be able to double it and get a significant boost in performance. I’m all about being able to take incremental steps in my investments.  Right now, the Quadro 2000 + Tesla C2075 will set you back $2500.  When you consider that I can buy a whole desktop PC for the same or less, I think a lot of Premiere Pro users will pass on this very powerful GPU option…and I understand.

There’s also the longstanding idea of using SLI or multiple Quadro or GeForce cards together and multiply your GPU processing power.  That’s something that we’d like to do, but haven’t so far.  I see supporting Maximus as a step in the right direction.

In addition, I’d love to see the Maximus combination be extended out to Mac users though a lot of that depends on the Apple.  Heck, I’d like to see more NVIDIA options for the Mac period, but I believe the Quadro 4000 is the right card to have and I’m very happy to see it available for Mac users.

Next up on the docket for me is to test a GeForce card – as soon as I get one, I will try to put it through its paces as I have received several requests to do so.

Comments and discussion are always welcome – post below if you’ve got something to say.

I went into this endeavor thinking that I would clearly delineate between different Quadro level cards and along the way understand what each one offered in the way of performance.  I was methodical in setting up my system and in trying to create real-world tests that would emphasize what the GPU brought to the table.

While I did learn a lot (which I will pass on to you in due course), the experience and tests in some cases were not always as clear-cut as I had expected.

In my role at Adobe, I sometimes have to present an ‘executive summary’ that gives the key points in a pithy and concise manner.  For those of you that have no time to waste and lets be honest that’s most of us, here are my key findings:

• The idea of a balanced system for Adobe CS5 and above with regards to 64-bit native applications is critically important to having the very best performance.
• While you still get the Mercury Playback Engine without having a GPU card installed on your system, I was genuinely surprised by how much of a difference it made on many of the tests I ran.
• What the GPU provides in terms of a boost is dependent on the kinds of codecs you’re using.  This is similar to the CPU which makes me point you back to my first point again (!)
• The difference in cards is a mixed bag, but there are clear differences in performance as you scale up.
• Determining the right card for you depends on two primary things: the rest of your system’s capabilities (point 1 again) and the kind of codec(s) you’re using.
• Finally, the fractional resolution playback system in Premiere Pro CS5 and later is a marvelous feature that allows lesser systems to still have acceptable or even good performance with big, heavy productions.  Combined with the GPU, this allows the most powerful and flexible editing/playback engine out there today.  Some people call playing back at half-res as ‘cheating.’  On the contrary, I find that I don’t even know when I’m doing that and have to check periodically.  It’s a SUPER feature that I think some people don’t understand.

The system:

I am using a 2-year-old HP Z800 with 16GB of RAM and an internal 4-drive SATA RAID array.  The drives were getting a consistent 424MB/s read and write using the AJA utility.   I have two physical CPU’s each with six cores and hyper-threading turned on to present a 24-core system.  The chips are XEON X5660 and have a clock speed of 2.8Ghz.  The system contains an AJA Xena/Kona 3 and I may test the GPU capabilities with AJA and others in the future, but for this test, all sequences were Adobe native.

In my opinion, I would say the following about the general sense of the system:

Prepping the box:

To make sure the Z800 was using the latest drivers, I visited the HP website and upgraded the BIOS as well as all Windows 7 files that were necessary.  As a person who is routinely playing with a variety of software packages, I uninstalled as many as were reasonable and also ran my favorite utility – Advanced System Care Free on the HP as well.  This great little utility helps allow for optimization, especially for people that are not uber geeks.

Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder each had a minor update right before the tests commenced, so I used 5.51 for both.

For NVIDIA drivers, I used at the latest (at the time of this article, 275.89)

On the slightly geekier side, I went through and tried to remove as many processes as I could to provide the most performance out of the box without over-clocking or other semi-questionable activities.

The Cards to be tested:

I wanted to keep this pretty real, but also exclusively Quadro (I’ll explain more on that in a bit).  In the category of ‘real’ I excluded the Quadro 6000 simply because I don’t think there are many people who are prepared to shell out that kind of money for GPU acceleration within Premiere Pro.  Hint – you need to be a RED user to even really have a good reason to in my opinion.

I wanted to use the popular Quadro FX4800 (from the last generation of products) to provide a baseline reference and I wanted to see how much performance I could get out of a Quadro 2000.  Finally, the two that make the most sense for Premiere Pro users – The Quadro 4000 and Quadro 5000.

Quadro 2000 gets booted at the last moment:

Unfortunately, I had to pull out the Quadro 2000 during my tests because I discovered a bug that I need to verify.  Rather than wait for NVIDIA to send me another Quadro 2000 and have Adobe engineers verify if I found something, I pulled the card from the tests.  I had problems with the RED tests but not the other sequences.  I hope to isolate what the problem is and deliver a Quadro 2000 test as an amendment to this article in the future.  The Quadro 2000 is perhaps one of the most intriguing cards there as it’s about $500 and fits the price of cost conscious video editors.

Ok, why no love for the GeForce?

Why just Quadros?  Why not the very popular GeForce cards?  Granted, I think these cards are great and will run equal with a Quadro card for a fraction of the cost.  But as I’ve mentioned previously, the Quadro cards are engineered to perform for long times without failure and if it gets hot, it gracefully degrades performance.  It’s over-engineered and manufactured by NVIDIA whereas the GeForce cards can be made by any of a dozen different companies.  Consequently, while a GeForce may look and perform as good or even better than a Quadro in the short term, I know that all of my Premiere engineers have repeatedly praised Quadro cards.  While NVIDIA may not like the analogy, its like a Toyota and a Mercedes: They both go from point A to B, but the quality and longevity of the Mercedes shows itself again and again.

The real truth about the tests:

Sadly, there is no single, quantitative test that I could run that would make my results read out as ‘Card A did X. Card B did X+Y’.  If there were, this would be a blessedly briefer article.  In the end I used a couple of real-world tests to help come out with some useful information.

While this test was done on a PC, I think it fair to say that the gist of it translates well to Apple computers as well.  The Quadro 4000 Mac is a good card overall and provides a true GPU enabled workflow for Premiere Pro users on the Mac platform.

PPBM5 test: “Premiere Pro Benchmark CS5”

First, I ran the PPBM5.5 tests for each card on the same system.  PPBM5 aims to try and give a numerical performance for 4 key metrics.  Surprisingly, the scores of non-GPU metrics changed.  Here’s the table of the scores for each – each number represents seconds and the total time represents the sum of the four tests:

Each of the numbers represents the time it took to do the task and the Total Time reflects the overall performance.  The site discusses the testing methodology and it also is worth a read. If you’re interested in seeing how your system matches up, go to the site and look at the large list of systems that have submitted their scores.  That itself is an interesting look at how different systems perform.  More thoughts on the PPBM5 test in my conclusions below.

Real-world GPU test (aka ‘my GPU torture test’)

The second series of tests were my own and based on building sequences of different material and testing frame rates (dropped frames) at given resolutions. I used an internal testing mechanism to measure a few things such as CPU utilization.  The most important thing I was looking at though is the number of dropped frames.  Even dropped frames don’t necessarily tell the whole story because of different codecs.  I found that multiple codecs task different aspects of the system so I picked three different ones to use for these tests.

AVCHD – Highly temporal in nature makes the CPU decode a chore.  In other words, it’s a LongGOP format. However, it is fairly lightweight in disk throughput and so not necessarily taxing on the disk drives.  AVCHD is also very similar to Canon’s popular DSLR H.264 codec, so that was an added bonus.

DVCProHD – This is not a LongGOP format but a bit heavier in terms of disk space.  At about 13MB/s it is not overly difficult for modern drive RAIDs, but still considerably bigger than AVCHD.  Its frame size is actually 1280×1020…

RED – This is a worst-case scenario for a GPU test.  Huge frame sizes and large data rates make this a chore for both the CPU, RAM and the drive array.  4K clips on any system are hard.  Throwing on effects is like turning the knife and pouring salt on a wound at the same time.  Ouch.

In creating sequences of these codecs, I wanted to focus on GPU performance and how that translated in dropped frames.  So, I stacked on as many effects as I could to push the GPU in the system.  For each of the three codecs, I created two sequences: One with a single clip with as many effects as possible; Second, I took four clips as PIPs and did the same.  Each type of sequence had the exact same effects applied in each case.

The results:

Some notes about the tables:

While I strove to make everything as absolutely accurate as possible, the fact is that I had to estimate on some of the values.  For example, the CPU utilization is changing all of the time.  I looked at both my internal CPU meter and the task manager performance panel and chose what I thought the average was over the duration of the sequence.  Scrubbing quality is also a subjective quality.  ‘Great’ meant that I could scrub faster than real-time and it would keep up.  ‘Fair’ meant that it was real-time or close to it.  ‘Poor’ describes intermittent frames showing in the program view and ‘Beyond Poor’ was…well.. you get the idea…

Lastly, I ran these tests several times and averaged the numbers to give the most accurate view.  In some cases, a timeline would drop no frames one time and then a few the next.  I tried to make a quality assessment based on multiple test runs.

Quadro FX4800:

Quadro FX4800 Performance Table

Quadro 4000:

Quadro 4000 Performance Table

Quadro 5000:

Quadro 5000 Performance Table

Some conclusions:

First, lets tackle the PPBM5 test.  Even with the MPE scores coming in nearly identical between all three cards, the net result changes in between cards.  Since, literally nothing changed in the system except the card itself, this lends itself to the idea that the total system score is the thing you really want to be after.  As they discuss on their site, there is no perfect test and the graphics card can affect the overall performance.

For my tests, I had a couple of surprises, one of which is how good Premiere Pro is at decoding RED files.  I would have expected anything short of the Quadro 5000 to drop some frames when dealing with four 4K files with effects on them at half resolution.  The fact that the FX4800 dropped 10 frames total (about 1 frame every 2 seconds) is remarkable.

This brings up another point.  We have to remember that dropping a couple of frames in a given duration is no big deal in most cases and it’s doubtful that we even see it (despite people attesting to the contrary).  Obviously, we always want to strive to have zero dropped frames all of the time, but given that a lot of online video is NOT 24 or 30fps and no one complains should be an indication that there are acceptable levels of frame rates that don’t hurt our editing or viewing experience.  Additionally, throwing 20 effects simultaneously on timelines isn’t something that you’re going to do even once in a while.  While it is intellectually interesting to look at this, the big thing we should come away with is that a good GPU can really improve the day to day workflow and efficiency of an editor.

Back to RED – Turning off the GPU in all cases has a clear result in performance.  The system dropped frames up to 95% of all frames at half-res without GPU turned on.  That’s just downright amazing and provides the RED user a clear answer on whether to get a good GPU card.  Answer – get one!

AVCHD really proved to be more challenging than I would have imagined.  It shows that CPU can still be challenged.  The GPU really makes a difference here too.  You see in the case all three cases, that the GPU improved playback performance by a factor of 3.  The question here for me is why is Premiere Pro not capitalizing on more CPU power here?  It’s a question I don’t have the answer to at present, but I’m taking it to the Premiere Pro team with the hopes of getting one.  I think the big takeaway for me on AVCHD is that I will work in half resolution all of the time and get a MUCH better editing experience (scrubbing, playback, etc).  Temporal codecs like AVCHD and H.264 are getting better, but can still be challenging on a lower-end system.

DVCProHD clearly was the least taxing of the codecs with regards to GPU enabled systems.  I think it’s because it is an intraframe codec meaning every frame is a full frame(picture).  While the disk usage is higher than AVCHD, the drive system in the PC was not going to break a sweat with 90MB/s.  Yes, the FX4800 dropped a fair number of frames (65) but again, that’s 20 effects and if you bump down to half resolution, all your problems go away.

Scrubbing with GPU is also enhanced but not universally.  There are anomalies, where I thought the FX4800 had the best scrubbing of AVCHD material overall.  I don’t have a good answer as to why but I can say that the subjective difference over a number of days is probably minimal.

My final conclusion:

GPU’s are good.  CUDA enabled NVIDIA GPU’s are awesome when editing with Premiere Pro CS5 or later.  Personally, I came away surprised at how much better the system performed with the NVIDIA GPU.  The performance between the cards scaled more or less linearly and in general they confirmed what I had suspected: The Quadro 4000 is a GREAT card for the money and provides real improvement for less than $1000.  The same could be said for the Quadro FX4800 if you find them used.  If editing is your business and you’re using Adobe Premiere Pro, then investing the money for a Quadro 5000 card is a wise investment.

Of course, the one caveat to the above is that you need to have a balanced system in order to make everything perform well.  Not having enough RAM is the single biggest problem I encounter.  It would be interesting to add another 8GB of RAM to the test machine and run the test again just to see what would happen.  Similarly, If you’re using RED and have two drives striped together, you’re asking for a problem.  CPU + RAM + HDD + GPU = awesome Adobe Premiere Pro editing platform.

Balance your Production Premium Mac or PC!

Thanks for reading and I hope this article generates some conversation and comments which I welcome.  Talk amongst yourselves and I’ll reply to any good comments or questions.

Dennis – Adobe guy

• I’m passionate about Adobe
• I’ve been thought of as peddling Adobe on FCP forums
• I tend to be very effusive and positive about things I like

That being said, I have to say that I’m REALLY psyched about this recent webinar by Chris Fenwick

Chris is totally honest about the good, the bad and the ugly.  He’s very thoughtful and experienced and he’s in the process of switching to Premiere Pro CS5 right now.  That’s intriguing in itself and he’s documenting it via his website.

The bottom line is that this guy is passionate like me but he doesn’t work for Adobe! Therefore, I hope, think and believe that he has some credibility where I might not.

The webinar may have a few hiccups in the beginning with audio, but stick it out and it’s a great 50 minutes.  Chris is an excellent presenter and he speaks candidly to FCP users and outlines what he likes and why about Premiere Pro.

So, check out the link below and navigate to Day 1 which is recorded.  Day 2-4 will also be there as they happen.

Chris Fenwick Webinar

In addition to showing how Premiere Pro and other Adobe applications, my goal is to bring some of the accessories that go with DSLR cameras.  I’ll be bringing some rigs for mounting the cameras and talking about what I’ve used and liked.

Register for the event here

I look forward to seeing you there!

Yesterday, Adobe posted a beta version of Audition to the site and if you’re a Mac fan, I hope you’ll take the time to download it, give it a try and tell us what you think.  Bringing Audition to the Mac was the #1 feature request of users and as we’ve been making a huge effort to make all of our core applications cross-platform, this is a huge announcement.

For those of you who are audio people but haven’t ever played with Audition, you might ask the question, “Why should I care? What about ProTools? What about insert favorite audio program here.  Valid question – let me answer it.

In a sentence, Audition does things with audio that hardly any other audio application really does to this day.  Namely, in addition to all of the standard audio stuff you might expect, Audition allows you to see audio in a three dimensional way, whereas nearly all other audio programs display audio in two dimensions.

You cry foul! Of course, audio apps let you see information in three dimensions (time, amplitude and frequency) – called frequency space view.  Okay, you got me, there are some applications (like Soundtrack Pro) that let you see frequency space, but can they edit it? Do they have a healing brush for audio? Do you have powerful noise reduction tools that in combination with the frequency space view give you unparalleled editing tools for surgical precision?

Well, rather than rant and propound on the merits of Audition, why don’t I just let you download it and try it for yourself – after  all, the best part of this is that the beta is absolutely free…

In Todd’s article, he outlines why GPU can make video better and sometimes faster as well. It’s definitely worth the read and I hope you’ll follow the link.

Details about scaling in Premiere Pro

To get more information and sign up for a beta check out this link  Read on and get my take on what is unique about Adobe Audition.

For better or worse, I have a long background in audio.  I was working on ProTools even before it was  called ProTools.  My college degree is in music and I’ve owned my own recording studio in the past.  Suffice it to say, I know audio – or at least I used to!

If you hear me talk about Adobe audio, you will almost assuredly hear me say that Adobe produced the last revolutionary thing in audio. Revolutionary as opposed to evolutionary.  Lots of things are being done to evolve the DAW and perfect audio editing, but nothing revolutionary.

Adobe Audition 3.0 has long had something called Spectral Frequency editing.  A better way to describe it would be "3 dimensional audio editing."  In short, you can see three parameters instead of two: You get Frequency in addition to time and amplitude.  What that extra bit of information allows you to do, well, is revolutionary.  My trademark line when describing Frequency Space editing is "If you can see it, you can fix it!"  Imagine being able to remove coughs or HVAC noise, or 60Hz rumble, or all manner of other audio noises. Or add reverb only to 1kHz through 4kHz.  Audition is flat out the best tool for this kind of work, 7-8 years after this feature was first introduced. 

So, to bring this functionality to the Mac and to a new generation of users is going to be awesome.  More information will be coming in the course of time, but for now, click the link, read up and get ready for some new audio tools to play with!

• Moved from analog to digital
  transmission.
• From standard definition to high
  definition (two flavors, not one by the way).
• We’ve gone from a couple of formats
  (betacam and DV) to an ever growing list of formats.
• The world has gotten even more media
  saturated meaning that content has to be even better.
• Broadcasters don’t worry about one
  screen (TV), they worry about three (TV, online, mobile)
• The world has moved from tape based
  (remember those?) to file-based formats.
• And oh, by the way, we’ve had an
  incredibly challenging economy that means capital expenditures
  (improving your equipment) have been difficult to say the least.

For this second of two parts, I will offer up some feedback that I’ve gotten from media executives around some of these challenges and how CS5 is addressing their needs. 

CS5,Production Premium,Premiere Pro,Broadcasters,Broadcast,64-bit

To be completely transparent, I am going to say that I’m paraphrasing what I’ve heard from media executives (hey – I don’t have a photographic memory!) and that the companies will not be explicitly named.  It needn’t be stated (but I will!) that Adobe works with EVERY major media company in the world given the impact and breadth of Adobe’s software portfolio.

"Premiere Pro has provided tremendous flexibility to allow us not to worry about the production element of the broadcast pipeline.  As we transition to HD cameras, we can count on Premiere Pro to be there to support it."

First off the move to HD has not necessarily been complete.  While nearly all of the acquisition going on is now HD (SD cameras are almost completely gone), transmission can still largely be SD in many markets.  This can present several issues. One of Adobe’s key customers is dealing with SD and HD stations.  Consequently, they’re dealing with unique issues with cameras and production.  What if you have SD and HD cameras.  What if (shudder) one of them shoots 4×3 only?  Adobe tools and Premiere Pro specifically can handle all of these things without difficulty, which leads us to our next point.

"As we continue to amortize our hardware, it’s absolutely essential that our editing bays be able to use media from all different kinds of sources, be it tape or file based, or even user-generated content."

That brings us to one of the significant key advantages that many broadcast companies have come to truly appreciate about recent iterations of Premiere Pro - namely, the ability to mix and match different codecs on the same timeline. Think about it, if you’ve invested $10k in a 16×9 DV camera a few years ago and now are transitioning to a file based HD format, there are reasons why you want to get more life from that camera. Two reasons are the photojournalist knows that camera inside and out and will get great images every time and also that camera cost $10k - get more life out of it!

Premiere Pro can seemlessly handle and mix different codecs, frame rates and aspect ratios on the same timeline without transcoding, without rewrapping and without waiting.  It’s completely transparent to the editor, because they shouldn’t have to think about what any of the media is, they should just interact with and use it, right?

"Allowing our editors to be able to edit without distraction is probably our number one need. The Mercury Playback Engine empowers our editors to be creative and without restrictions.  This is a killer feature."

Let’s knock off one of the big ones now shall we?  As I’ve said previously, we can sum up the CS5 release with one word: Performance.  A phrase that I’ve seen several times in describing CS5 has been "Game Changer."  It’s always interesting how performance can be a game changer for our industry and it’s true that CS5 is a game changer when it comes to performance.  The Mercury Playback Engine has got a lot of broadcasters and media companies really excited.  One point I think it important to mention is that it isn’t about how much real-time as much as it is about enabling workflows that heretofore hadn’t really existed.  Native DSLR editing, real-time 2k RED editing, LongGOP formats, etc. These are the things that I think the Mercury Playback Engine really do well.  When you come back to performance, it equates with time saved and possibly a higher production value.  Right now, Premiere Pro stands atop of the NLE mountain when it comes to sheer performance and playback ability.

"Natively supporting our chosen tapeless format is what really drew us to look at Premiere Pro more closely.  The potential time savings that can be realized in the news market is huge."

In addition, the fact that Adobe is supporting all of the flavors of a given codec (in all cases both 1080 and 720) gives them a lot of comfort when it comes to their final output.  Quality also is a concern and Adobe’s ‘resolution independent play back engine’ has allowed users to deliver these mixed timelines at the highest quality, without even thinking about it.  A lot of news companies have embraced XDCAM variants and with CS5 we now support 50Mbit XDCAM as well as the 35Mbit version.  Canon’s entered the tapeless camera business and we support the XF format.  Yes, that’s supported already. Flip cameras and their ilk – YES.  DSLR’s you say?  But of course!  I actually see some news agencies as loving this camera (albeit with some caveats) as it can do both stills and video – it’s just the audio that’s a bit unprofessional. In fact, Premiere Pro can use Apple’s ProRes or even Avid’s DNXHD in the timeline. Right now, there’s nothing I can think of in terms of a file-based or tapeless format that Adobe does not support and that’s great news for broadcasters and users everywhere.

"Our evaluation of CS5 has shown tremendous performance benefits with a 64-bit OS. As we change out our hardware, this is going to make a major difference in our ability to complete our work on time with the quality we demand."

I’ve said to people that if Adobe had just done 64-bit and not the Mercury Playback Engine, it would have been a killer release, and it’s true. I’ve guessed at a 50% performance increase on my 3 year old Mac laptop.  Not only do I get more out of it, but everything launches faster too.  Premiere Pro CS4 would take a while to launch on a slower system, but with CS5, it’s up quickly. Snappier, check. Quick launch, check. Faster, oh yeah!  Media companies and their artists demand functionality, but sometimes the idea of snappy and a quick feel get lost in the shuffle. I’m excited to say that isn’t the case with CS5.

"Dynamic Link for us has finally arrived with CS5.  While it’s worked adequately in the past, it just didn’t provide the performance that we needed.  Now, it does and we’re planning on using it in our upcoming projects."

Integration has been a hallmark with Adobe products.  We’ve been shipping products with Dynamic Link for 4 versions now and it continues to be a big draw for smaller companies. Granted, there is still more for us to do as we engage in larger network systems, but the ability to seemlessly move media from After Effects to Premiere Pro to Encore remains a compelling feature. What’s changed this version that has affected the performance is again 64-bit.  When I first checked out Dynamic Link in CS5, I was blown away.  On a desktop system or speedy laptop, I can do a simple lower third composition in After Effects and play it in real-time inside of Premiere Pro without any RAM preview!  If you’re a user of After Effects, you just got excited right?  I know I was when I saw it. We’ve still got more good things we hope to do for Dynamic Link in the future, but users seem very satisfied with the improvements we’ve made for CS5.

Clearly, there is more that we could address.  The ability to output multiple file types in the background through Adobe Media Encoder is something that I think many content companies are going to discover as well.  We’ve started to really see more content going to mobile and with the new Flash enabled phones and devices popping up everywhere, it will be extremely interesting time for viewers.

CS5 is in many ways a ‘broadcast release’ in my mind.  It was focused on high-end workflows and features.  But, here’s the coolest thing: Every user has benefited from the kind of enhancements that have made it into CS5.  Post production, event videography, etc.  We’ve discovered that if you’re focusing on workflows and professional customers that you will have happy customers.  While it’s premature to say (only a couple of weeks of shipping), I’d say you can expect more of the same focus and attention on these kinds of things in the next version.

As always, I would welcome your comments and feedback!

• Moved from analog to digital transmission.
• From standard definition to high definition (two flavors, not one by the way).
• We’ve gone from a couple of formats (betacam and DV) to an ever growing list of formats.
• The world has gotten even more media saturated meaning that content has to be even better.
• Broadcasters don’t worry about one screen (TV), they worry about three (TV, online, mobile)
• The world has moved from tape based (remember those?) to file-based formats.
• And oh, by the way, we’ve had an incredibly challenging economy that means capital expenditures (improving your equipment) have been difficult to say the least.

Without the least bit of exaggeration, many people have said that this is the perfect storm of change and with this change there’s an opportunity to thrive from it.  That’s where Adobe’s been focusing – how to make our customers succeed in this storm of change.

This will be the first of a two part entry. Here, I will outline the challenges that broadcasters are facing and how Adobe can help address them. In the second part, I’ll provide some feedback I’ve gotten from executives on their business as well as their reactions to CS5.

CS5,Production Premium,Premiere Pro,Broadcasters,Broadcast,64-bit

Firstly, broadcasters cannot continue to keep doing things the way they’ve have in the past.  Customers have told me that over and over again. To do the same thing is to stand still and to stand still is to die.  The speed of innovation has increased and the need to try things (and get them right) has forced companies to think differently.

Two things have really driven this state of constant change from the broadcaster’s perspective (though I’m sure there are more).  First, there is the increase in formats and second, an increase in the number of deliverables (or screens).

The codec or format scene has exploded over the last 10 years.  I remember when DV came on the scene and it was regarded both as a savior and an intruder.  A savior for smaller markets because the quality was high and format inexpensive enough.  An intruder to those that weren’t ready to abandon Betacam and other 4:2:2 tape based formats. Today, we see Premiere Pro supporting AVCHD, AVC-Intra (all), DSLR (Canon/Nikon), DV, DVCPro50, DVCProHD, HDV, RED R3D, XDCAM EX, XDCAM HD (35 and 50mbit), with room and presets to support things like iPhone video and more.  In fact, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 is a resolution independent engine that can support just about anything that is on the system with frame sizes in excess of 8K or twice of what the RED ONE camera currently does.

The number of file types or destinations that a media company or broadcaster has to prepare for has likewise multiplied.  Back in the day, they had to worry about getting the file (or tape) played at their NOC (Network Operations Center) to put it on the air and view it.  Now, in addition to the web, there’s the growing idea of getting the content out to mobile devices. Talk about challenging! Adobe has talked about creating content once and being able to distribute it to many screens.  We believe that customers expect to be able to view media at anytime, anywhere and on any device. When you consider Flash video’s penetration on devices, it’s transparent user experience and it’s ability to deliver to both online and mobile devices, it seems that Adobe has a good solution for broadcasters.  Many companies like ESPN have recently updated their online viewing experience and they chose Flash simply because it was the best solution out there.  And of course, one conspicuous handset aside, there are hundreds of millions of Flash enabled handsets and devices that dwarf anything else that’s out there.

Media has to get out to those three screens fast! Of course, that’s most important in broadcast news, but I’ve seen shrinking staffs and increasing work loads for as long as I’ve been in this business.  One executive has told me in the past that they’re a ‘sausage factory. We have to get the sausage out as quickly as possible.’  With reduced staffs, tighter deadlines and higher demands on quality where do you turn?  The answer from most broadcasters is in creating greater efficiencies in their workflows and using tools that will help them realize more media in less time.  That’s been a core strength of Adobe for some time.  With Dynamic Link and tightly integrated workflows, you can get your work from point A to B more quickly with less down time than anyone else out there.

One final issue that I will mention is integrating systems between different vendors. Simply put, Adobe helps people create the content, but it doesn’t help them manage where it is, when it should be deleted, where should it go for broadcast, which server will play out the file, etc. Clearly, there are ways to get from point A to point B, but many times, they are inefficient and increase the chance that something can go wrong.  Integration with 3rd party vendors has been something that Adobe has worked on for a couple of years and I think will explode over the next couple of years through our Flash panel integration that will allow vendors to integrate their functionality and interfaces directly into products like Premiere Pro.

There are so many more challenges and issues that I could cover but will forgo for now.  In the next part, I will offer some conclusions and statements for consideration. Right now, I see broadcasters adopting a greater portion of Adobe’s Production Premium CS5 toolset that started all the way back in CS3 and expanded during the CS4 cycle.  Am I right or am I missing something?  Let me know.

That said, it’s a product that has changed the way we look at images and created an industry and impact that is frankly bigger than Adobe.  The more you think about it, the more you say things like, "Wow, Photoshop is huge."

Most of the time, that’s it for me, but with Photoshop turning twenty, Adobe TV has put up a reminiscent view of how it all began with the Knoll brothers and a few others.  This video is actually a lot of fun and if you’re inclined, I recommend watching the whole thing.

Happy birthday Photoshop – you’ve been very good to us all!

Indiana Pacers

Haven’t heard about the Mercury Playback engine yet?  Good – Read on!

Brief Update – Hopefully, the read of this blog entry is entertaining, but in order to ‘see it in action’ I’ve embedded Dave’s video. Give it a view and then read on…

Let’s start with the back-story or history on the Adobe Mercury Playback engine.  Back at IBC in September, the show happened in Amsterdam and while Adobe was there talking about several things including Adobe Story – over at the NVIDIA booth, we were showing a technology preview with quiet undertones.  It didn’t have the name Mercury and it wasn’t even really the big thing we were showing.  However, John at FXGuide was over there and among several other tidbits, included Adobe in a podcast that he did over at the show. A month crawls along and during that time, the podcast starts to get some mentions in various forums and chatter amongst the creative crowd… People start to get excited about the possibilities and ask questions.  Here’s the high bandwidth version for your viewing pleasure.

Let me be clear before I go any further: This is a technology demo only and while Adobe is very excited, it’s not something that is available now in CS4 nor are we commenting about exactly when it will make an appearance.  Now, back to our regularly scheduled exciting blog post…

Somewhere along the way, amidst the growing awareness at Adobe, we conferred upon how to let our customers know about this exciting technology that we were working on and how to respond to the growing awareness of it.  Simple questions like, ‘How do we respond?’, ‘How much do we tell customers’ and several more like it.  Another question was, ‘What do we call it?’ For, as each person began to play with prototypes of this technology, each was convinced of its incredible potential.  This group included myself and my first casual examination of the Mercury Playback engine convinced me of it’s importance – more on that later.

Mercury as a name is interesting.  You could think of Greek/Roman mythology.  The God Hermes/Mercury was the winged messenger (makes me think of Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.“)  Mercury was fast, which makes sense in this context. There’s also the idea of Quicksilver, another name for the element Mercury, which again connotes speed and value (quick + silver).  Better perhaps is the idea of fluidity in the sense of the fluid editing experience that the Mercury Playback Engine creates.  Mercury the element has several unique properties, the foremost of which is it is the only metal that has a liquid state at room temperatures.  The Mercury Playback Engine has the potential of being very unique among the NLE players like the uniqueness of the element.

All of these things offer some shading and nuance to my thoughts about Adobe’s Mercury and cause me to have this level of enthusiasm.

So, here we are today – what is the Mercury Playback engine about?  In a word, performance!  It makes Premiere Pro do cartwheels and flips and barely breaks a sweat.  It’s like rocket fuel for your car.  It’s flat out incredible…

In my first test of Mercury, I dropped several P2 clips on a timeline, made them picture-in-picture and looked to see if there were any dropped frames during playback…nada.  I added more clips, bringing it up to eight or nine on my HP XW9400 with 12 cores of AMD goodness…  Think it’s the CPU?  No! It’s only being used at about 20-30%.  It’s GPU! I keep going and there is no hesitation in Premiere Pro. Okay, lets add some color correction to each one and while we’re at it, lets drop in some blurs (that will stop it right?)  Still playin’ like buttah!

I could go on but I think you get the idea.  As the FX Guide video described, we had 4 or 5 RED 4K images playing in real-time with very little CPU overhead which enabled us to do so much more in other areas. 

So as a thought, lets put the pieces together.  Premiere Pro CS4 is 64-bit optimized and making huge inroads into the high-end and having people all over the world taking another look if they’re not using it today. In October, we announced that the next version of Premiere Pro would be 64 bit native and 64 bit only. So, in the future, not only will you have the most current programming code on either platform (very important!), you will have among the best CPU utilization in the business, you will have 64 bit native goodness throughout and you have the insane performance of the GPU backing you up to make more things possible at once than ever before.  What’s not to like? Good question – lets take some now…

 Question: “What makes all of this ‘crazy’ stuff possible?” 

 Answer: It is a combination of different things.  Really, this is a great example of where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  What are the parts then?  It’s 64-bit native code, greater memory addressing, fantastic CPU optimization and finally NVIDIA CUDA technology.   Every one of these is critical, absolutely critical to making the future of non-linear editing better and more powerful than ever before.  Multi-core goodness and memory addressing are already hard at work in Premiere Pro CS4.  The 64-bit native code has been announced and now we bring in NVIDIA CUDA technology to be the icing on the cake and a powerful new engine to squeeze out performance in Premiere Pro.  Before I wax philosophic on GPU, let me officially tip my hat to the incredible engineers at Adobe and their work here for the Mercury Playback Engine.  Their passion, intelligence and outright cunning is what’s making this possible.  Bravo!

On NVIDIA: I’ve always been a fan of NVIDIA and their Quadro product line has a huge market share in the professional graphics card industry, so it makes a lot of sense for us to partner with them to provide the horsepower behind this new technology.  In addition, NVIDIA has been deeply involved in helping make this happen because like us, they know the customer and try to deliver the technology to enable more powerful and flexible workflows.

Question: “Why should I care about this?”

Answer: It’s a fair question.  Ultimately, the harnessing of the GPU provides Adobe with another way to fulfill a key strategic goal when designing our products: namely, removing the need for a user have to wait for the software to catch up to their creative vision.  Another way to think of it from Adobe’s perspective is that we already have great multi-processor CPU utilization, where can we get more power for the customer?  The answer is CUDA and hence the Mercury Playback engine.

One other aspect to this is the rate of innovation on GPU development.  While CPU’s from Intel and AMD continue to evolve and grow, the rate of innovation has slowed down dramatically.  This hasn’t been the case for GPU development.  We continue to see dramatic leaps in performance every 12-18 months.  The Quadro XXXX of today will be the GeForce of tomorrow and that means that your performance on a given system will be able to develop rapidly over time at a much lower cost than ever before.

Question: “I don’t do 10 layers of video Dennis, how does this help me?”

Answer: Okay, but as we see more people doing digital film, working with RED 4K files (with bigger on the way), as well as complex, temporal based codecs such as AVCHD, the idea of harnessing the GPU in addition to the CPU promises benefits for nearly everyone.  Plus, while you may not do 10 layers of video at any one time, most people are using basic color correction, levels, curves and many other things on a regular basis.  I think Mercury will help you even if you’re just using a couple of layers.

Question: “Are there any downsides to this technology?”

Answer: I guess it depends on your point of view but my ‘net-net’ answer is no, there is no downside.  A more pragmatic and perhaps nuanced answer is ‘depends’.  If you’re an ATI fan, you know that CUDA is NVIDIA products only and consequently, you’ll either do without this feature or you’ll switch to NVIDIA.  Adobe has a valuable relationship with ATI/AMD and we’re looking at things like OpenCL, which is a cross-platform GPU approach to what CUDA is.

Question: “Why didn’t you use OpenCL then?”

Answer: OpenCL wasn’t finished or ratified when this decision was made.  Given a choice between doing it with CUDA or not doing it for a while because of OpenCL, we chose the former.  Besides, as I mentioned, NVIDIA has a hugely dominant market share in the professional graphics market, so we think that most people will be comfortable with the options available to them.

Question: “Will you support OpenCL in the future?”

Answer: Clearly this is an answer for someone higher up to answer, but my hunch is that we’ll certainly look at it in the future as it aligns with our goals of being open and non-propietary.

Question: “Anything else I should know?”

Answer: Yes. The list of approved GPU cards will be limited initially to ensure that we have a consistent experience for our customers.   Obviously this begs the question of which cards are you going to support?  I think the answer here could be a moving target but two cards that I’ve been told will be supported are the GeForce GTX 285, the Quadro FX 4800, 5800 and the Quadro CX.  I’m currently doing my testing with the Quadro 4800.  The GeForce GTX 285 card should be one to really look at as it’s street price is only about $300.00 and provides a real value to users that are looking to get the maximum bang for the buck. 

Update 1-14-10: We will have support for the Quadro FX 3800 as well.

Lest you think that you Mac folks will be left out, you’ll notice that both the GeForce GTX 285 and the Quadro 4800 are both available for Mac…and so is the Mercury Playback Engine!

NVIDIA has announced that new cards will ship in early 2010 and I don’t know how that will impact which cards we support, but our general goals will be to a) provide consistent GPU performance across the cards we support b) support as many cards at as many prices as possible.  My hunch is that the initial list will be small, but we’ll do our best to expand upon that in future.  With new cards on the way, I wouldn’t run out to buy a card now unless I had to, but if you do, at least you have a good sense of what will be supported.

In addition, I don’t think there will be any approved laptop GPU processors as most of them are designed to be for laptops and just don’t provide the kind of horsepower to make a real difference.  This bums me out as I typically demo and present on a laptop, but the engineers and product management are telling me that there just isn’t enough juice to get a real sizeable performance difference out of them.  Again, this probably changes over the course of time.

Seeing is believing and I hope that you’ll have the opportunity to see the Mercury Playback Engine in action some time in the future.  I know if I’m the one presenting it to you, that I’ll be excited to show it!

Adobe,Technology,sneek peek,future,Premiere Pro,Mercury Playback Engine,CUDA,64,native,performance

Simply click the ‘download project’ button on the link below to get the plugin. To install, simply drag it into your AE plugin’s folder.

Happy reflection day,
Dennis

Reflection plugin

You can watch a video from Dave on Premiere Pro 4.2 here

Here’s a list of fixes and features:

New in this release

• Panasonic P2 AVC-Intra material is now supported; new sequence presets are also included for editing this format.

Notable fixes

• Final Cut Pro Project Converter is now compatible with Final Cut Pro version 7
• Final Cut Pro Project Converter now maintains timecodes from the originally captured sources from Final Cut Pro
• Playback no longer stops when connecting/disconnecting a USB keyboard or mouse
• Performance is no longer diminished in mixed format sequences during playback, scrubbing, and exporting
• Fixed a field output issue when rendering a 720p 60/50 source in an interlaced SD sequence
• Third-party support

Known issues

• Use of Project Manager is not recommended for AVC-I since clip spanning is lost during project collect and copy
• Clip duration in media browser does not match duration of clip once it is imported
• AVC-I clips are redbar in native sequences

I don’t think many people are shocked by this and hopefully many people are excited about this as we slowly get closer to CS ‘Next’.  And to answer your next thought, no, it’s not anytime soon!

I’ve added a couple of graphics and reviewed the text. Originally published 10/20/2009

64-bit is logical on many levels.  The benefits are numerous and can be summed up by one word: performance. 

There is the question as to why is Adobe announcing this now, so far in advance of anything?  The answer is you my friends.  We want to make sure that you’re aware of where we’re going and that if you have any thoughts about upgrading in the future, that you have the necessary time to get ready for it.  In addition, if you’re using CS4 and not using 64-bit now, you should run not walk to the store to upgrade your OS and memory.  The benefits of ’64-bit aware’ CS4 are awesome right now. I have talked about it previously here and here.

CS ‘Next’ and true 64-bit is the next logical step and will provide users with optimized code, greater stability and more performance.  Video editing or motion content creation has always demanded the most from any computer and we believe that this won’t change any time soon.  Therefore the move to 64-bit is a necessary step towards the future to ensure that Adobe can continue to bring exciting tools and features to our customers.

Why no 32-bit version? There’s a good answer for that one as well.  The bottom line is that it’s a different program than a 64-bit version.  Two versions = two types of code.  Twice the engineering, twice the checking, twice everything.  You say, "Yeah, so what?"  Well, Adobe may be a large software company, but they do not have infinite resources. We’re constantly doing a balancing act – trying to get as many cool things we can with a certain number of resources.  I think we’ve done a pretty good job in the past.  Our assessment was that it was better to make one awesome 64-bit version of Premiere Pro and After Effects than to make two versions that were so-so.

What about all of the other products in the CS ‘next’ suite (whatever they may be)? Will they be 64-bit as well?  The answer on this one is mostly no.  As you know Photoshop CS4 on the Windows side is already 64-bit native, so that won’t be a problem.  The rest of the suite will remain 32-bit for the time being, but a move to 64-bit is probably eventual. Getting performance out of the two main video centric apps (Premiere Pro and After Effects) was essential and so it was done.

This decision has been a long time coming. It goes back about a year!  This should give you an idea of a) how far we’re thinking in the future and b) how much we’re thinking about the customer!

One final tidbit on the whole 64-bit only decision.  Originally, I passionately objected that dropping 32-bit versions would hobble a large bulk of our users.  I admitted that this was a necessary step and that it was a limited problem since the world would eventually move to 64-bit anyway, but it wasn’t the right time I argued.  Over the ensuing months, in talking to customers and in promoting the fact that CS4 loved 64-bits anyway I saw that most of our customers have already moved to 64-bit operating systems.

Today I find myself excited about the break from 32-bit and know that our customers have either moved or will move to 64-bit.  Snow Leopard is solidly if not entirely 64-bit and Windows 7 looks to be a real winner with the Windows crowd, so it’s a great time to start preparing.

Where you can get more information

A post on ProVideo Coalition

On the Production Premium Product page (You’ll have to look – there’s a lot of information there!)

And the FAQ

There are lots of FAQs on each of the product pages as well, but the above will hopefully get you started.

This is big for so many reasons.  It’s big because it continues to validate Adobe Systems in broadcast, and I’m NOT talking about After Effects or Photoshop. It’s big because it is another real world customer that is giving input into Adobe on how to make their products better which we all benefit from.

It’s big because News is one of the most demanding, deadline-driven environments that video production tools can be put in…

Hearst chose Adobe Systems because they saw two main things: Adobe’s innovation and Adobe’s willingness to communicate and pro-actively work with them. On innovation, they saw native file support for their chosen ENG format when competitors did not.  With today’s announcements on Adobe Story and Cinema DNG, we demonstrate (albeit in a different arena) that we continue to innovate for our customers.

On the idea of communication, it’s essential that large media companies be able to offer input into how they want the workflow and products to function.  Simple concept, very difficult for a manufacturer to execute.  I’m glad to say that Adobe has been successfully doing this for a few years now, starting back with the BBC.  Now US companies are benefitting from this same approach.  More to come on that in the future!

Lastly, I’ll note that I am personally excited to be a part of this effort and look forward to communicating much more as the months progress.

Think about it – there are thousands of words in most scripts.  Words that describe the scene, talk about the subject matter, etc.  What about a car that’s a prop in a movie? Let’s say the car needed is a BMW – now this is an opportunity for the movie to sell a sponsorship spot to BMW.  In the same sense, BMW can push out a clip of the new car in this movie and make sure that BMW enthusiasts around the world can easily find this bit of video.

Some of the nifty features of Adobe Story that I like are the ability to import Final Draft and other types of common script formats.  These formats include Microsoft Word and others.  Ultimately, the script can also become a gateway for a more efficient production workflow as well. Having an export from Adobe Story that can drive shot lists in OnLocation… There’s a lot of possibilities.

So…where do you get all of the details? Right here of course

I will be partnering with OffHollywood in doing a presentation on RED and Adobe workflows. While this will be a speedy 45 minute presentation, it should be a great one so I hope to see you there. 

In addition, I will be attending a combined NY area user groups meeting.  AENY(me) will be joining with MoPictive and the Avid user group to have a powerful meeting of the three A’s.  That starts at 5:30 and should be a lot of fun.  You can find much of the details at the bottom of this page.

Finally, I may end up being at a booth (Videoguys.com) when I’m not at anything else.  I hope that you will stop by and say hello.