The whole series, including lots of people much more interesting than myself, can be found here: http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/category/ae-me

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

Unfortunately, with all good intentions, it sometimes generates a certain amount of confusion and at the request of a friend and coworker, I’m here to set the record straight on the details of Adobe’s current promotional offer for FCP and Avid users.

First off – the details of the offer is here.

Save 50% off Adobe® Creative Suite® 5.5 Production Premium or Adobe Premiere® Pro CS5.5 software if you own Apple Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer with offer code SWITCH. Offer ends September 30, 2011. See terms.

This offer is available to editors interested in switching from their current tool of choice to Premiere Pro or Production Premium.  I previously had a couple of people ask me about switching from Sony Vegas. Our initial idea was to offer an upgrade path for FCP users who were feeling stranded, but then as we moved forward, we opened it to Avid Media Composer, Grass Valley Edius or Sony Vegas owners too.

While my personal focus is clearly in the US, Adobe is a global company.  As such, this Switcher offer is available on adobe.com worldwide (“SWITCH” promo code) with the exception of Japan. We will be adding Japan soon!

Sometimes things happen that cause some trouble.  Rarely – but it happens.  If you’re having trouble with purchasing or using the promo code SWITCH, contact Adobe Customer Service in your region: http://www.adobe.com/support/contact

A final closing note for you to consider:  This offer is definitely, definitely a temporary thing and if you’re at all on the bubble about doing it or not, I encourage you to consider it.  As I’ve said previously, I’ve never seen anything like this from Adobe and honestly, I expect the powers that be to wake up one day and say, “What were we thinking.”  So don’t say that you weren’t warned!

But times continue to be tough and despite possibly getting your $300 back, you’re faced with a daunting decision – stay the course or look for something new that will support your creative vision and your wallet?

I’m very excited to say that Adobe is working hard: not only at making great products that work for professionals, but at making the decision to try and/or purchase Adobe Production Premium as absolutely easy as possible.

Today we announced a program that will allow users of FCP and Avid to painlessly switch over to Adobe Production Premium at a price that I’ve frankly never seen in my 6.5 years at Adobe.  To top that off, while my personal focus is North America, this offer is WORLDWIDE, so no one is being left out!

So, lets not belabor this – it’s a ‘such-a-deal’ (spoken in my best, thick NY/NJ accent) and as an Apple or Avid owner,  if you’ve considered Production Premium in the past but haven’t done it yet – now’s the time.

In the news room – Adobe Announces Switch Program

More info and eligibility requirements

Taking the plunge (Promo Code: SWITCH) – Production Premium Offer

Not sure what all the hubbub’s about but interested in kicking the tires? Try Adobe Production Premium CS5.5 for FREE for 30 days

So to begin, it makes sense to start with defining what MPE is.  It is NOT(!) just about hardware GPU acceleration.

The Mercury Playback Engine is three discrete components:

• 64-bit native application – as opposed to 32-bit like most applications
• 64-bit memory addressing – use more RAM
• GPU hardware acceleration for effects – ‘go faster juice’ for your system

Todd Kopriva recently did a run down on MPE, CUDA and what it means to Premiere Pro. You should give this page a peak and then come on back.  By the way, Todd is a great resource and his blog is a great page to bookmark.

Now, lets get specific on the Mac and some of the questions I’ve gotten over the last several months…

Q: Can I use Premiere Pro on a Mac?

YES. Shockingly (at least to me), there is still a portion of users that are not aware that Premiere Pro is available today on a Mac.  It is worth noting that Premiere, which started 20 years ago, originally started on a Mac.  It’s been written from the ground up three times including the current 64-bit CS5 version. With CS3 (our first re-write), we returned to the Mac in response to customer demand and delivered the first Mac version of Production Premium, which is the primary product that contains Premiere Pro today.

Q: Is Premiere Pro 64-bit ‘native’ or ‘optimized’, because I hear there is a difference?

Premiere Pro CS5 on a Mac is a 64-bit native application and all of the benefits that this implies.  Premiere Pro and After Effects in the CS4 timeframe were 64-bit ‘optimized’ meaning they could address more than 4GB of total memory, but did not do much beyond that.   As a side note, Adobe Media Encoder is also 64-bit native.

Q: Do I need an NVIDIA graphics card (GPU) to be able to use Premiere Pro CS5 on a Mac? All of the new Macs (both towers and laptops) use ATI graphics cards and I’m on a budget!

Let me be very clear about this answer – ABSOLUTELY NOT! This is a big one.  As much as I absolutely love NVIDIA technology and what it can do for our users, it is not necessary for running Premiere Pro or any other CS5 application.  Remember: the MPE is a combination of three technologies or features, but you don’t have to have all three in order to use it. If you get a Mac Pro tower and it has an ATI card, you’re still getting two-thirds of the MPE technology and it will still run rings around FCP7 or any other software NLE in terms of how many video streams and effects you can run in real-time.  Why?  It’s the 64-bit goodness and memory addressing that makes up Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop and Adobe Media Encoder.

I’ve been accused of being an Adobe marketing weasel because Mac users and particularly FCP users think that Premiere Pro can’t do it’s magic without a great GPU card.  In particular, many FCP users feel that a GPU is essential in order to edit and playback challenging temporal codecs such as those found on Canon DSLR and AVCHD cameras.  Nothing could be further from the truth!

Q: Okay, if Premiere Pro on a Mac doesn’t need a GPU to actually edit AVCHD and DSLR footage smoothly, then what DOES the GPU add to my editing system?

Great question, I’m glad you asked.

The NVIDIA graphics card provides processing of effects that you apply to your clips on the timeline. Once you understand and process this, you’ll come to this conclusion: Having an NVIDIA GPU gives you the ability to balance the load between different computing components.  If effects like color correction, dissolves, etc. can be moved over to the GPU, then that means the CPUs have more headroom and ability to focus on what they’re good at – decoding video and playing it.

Q: If I have the other two aspects of MPE, what does that really give me?

The 64-bit native nature of the application allows Adobe to utilize all of your CPU cores (and virtual  ones) much more effectively than with a non-64-bit application.  How many cores do you have?  Wouldn’t you like to be able to use all of them?

The ability to address far more than 4GB of total memory with an application also means that large projects or projects that contain After Effects Projects, Photoshop documents and the like will continue to perform well.  To my knowledge, current Macs (early 2011) can address up to 32GB of total memory.  As you can see from this picture, Adobe applications recognize others that are open and can more effectively share or release to another application.  In the case of After Effects, you can also reserve a number of CPUs to remain outside of its domain again allowing other applications to work well (not just Adobe). So, if you have 16GB of memory, you can effectively use it all and recognize performance gains as well.

Many popular applications are 32-bit only and can only address up to 4GB of memory.  As we’ve quickly moved to HD, 2K, DSLR, RED and even DPX files, the ability for a professional 32-bit application to deal with this kind of media en masse has become an increasing challenge.  Take it from us, we went through it!

Q: I need to work with other FCP editors and so I need to use ProRes.  That means I can’t use Premiere Pro for those kinds of projects can I?

You can use Premiere Pro CS5 and cut ProRes all day long.

There are probably two scenarios that I can envision.  First, you start with FCP and want to move it to Premiere Pro.  Second, you start in Premiere Pro and want to hand off to FCP.

The first scenario is really easy.  If the other editor has cut ProRes with FCP, he only needs to export his timelines as XML and give you the media.  As long as your Mac (or PC) includes the ProRes decoders in QT, you don’t need anything else to edit ProRes on a Mac.  While Premiere Pro CS5 doesn’t explicitly give you ProRes presets, it is very easy to create them.

The second scenario is almost as easy.  However, you will need to be on a Mac and have FCP installed.  If you know you’re going to hand off to a FCP editor and need to use ProRes – then use Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder (AME) to create another preset to transcode that footage to ProRes.  One thing that a lot of Mac users don’t know about AME is that you can create a watch folder that will automatically convert anything you drop there to your chosen codec.  This is a 64-bit, multi-threaded, background process that allows you to work on other things even as it’s churning through the media.  From there, do your edit and hand your FCP buddy an XML and pristine ProRes when you’re ready.

Q: Apple is using ATI and a similar technology to CUDA called OpenCL. Will Adobe embrace OpenCL in the future?

When CS5 was under development and I showed the Technology Sneak Peek, OpenCL wasn’t even ratified or finished.  CS5 wouldn’t have had GPU acceleration at all had it been based on OpenCL.  Even today (March, 2011), we don’t have a lot of real OpenCL applications. Adobe is continuing to evaluate OpenCL for future development but today Adobe’s GPU acceleration technology is based on CUDA from NVIDIA.

One final note for Mac users.  There is a great group of passionate Premiere Pro users that have developed a PC-based benchmarking system.  They have been open to developing a Mac-based one, but don’t have the knowledge and Macs to get it done.  Want to find out how your Mac really stacks up?  Volunteer by going to Premiere Pro Benchmark CS5 site.

UPDATE 3/14/11: Dave Helmly has published a short video that shows Premiere Pro running on the latest MacBook Pro (8.3) with an ATI/AMD card. In this video you see the remarkable performance without running a CUDA GPU.  When watching the video consider that he’s running the OS, Premiere Pro and screen capture software all on a fairly measly 8GB of RAM – pretty amazing to me.

With CS5, we’ve updated the feature so that you do not have to dig into the directories in order to trash your preferences.  When launching Premiere Pro from either Mac or PC you can hold down a couple of keys while launching to automatically throw away your preferences.

For the Mac it is Shift+option (or shift+alt).

For the PC it is Shift+alt

You will know it works when the Premiere Pro splash screen doesn’t have projects listed.

Of course, the old way outlined in my previous post will still do the trick.  You’re just looking for a ’5.0′ folder instead of ’4.0′.

One other tip that I find very useful, is periodically cleaning up your cache file in Premiere Pro.  This folder holds all of your peak audio files among others and while individual files may be small, over time they build up. In fact, I looked at my laptop folder as I was typing this and my folder was 1.5GB!  While not all of this is Premiere Pro (most Adobe video apps have a cache folder and the ability to clean it), it did remind me that this is a great little thing to do once in a while.

In Premiere Pro preferences, you will see something like this:

As I mentioned, it’s a good thing to do for all of your apps and after going through all of the main video applications that I use (Premiere Pro, After Effects, Encore, Adobe Media Encoder, Audition and Soundbooth, I recovered nearly all of that 1.53GB.  That’s a good thing!

So, remember once in a while to do your Adobe maintenance even as you periodically do your PC/Mac maintenance… You do that right?

Part of what makes news ‘tick’ in many markets is the idea of a News Production System.  There are a few that are out there, but one of the largest in the US market is the Associated Press’ ENPS.  Basically, this product is the nerve center of a specific TV channel.  Wouldn’t it be great if the ENPS program could be expressed directly inside of the NLE (Premiere Pro)?  Wouldn’t that create a more efficient workflow?  That’s what Hearst thought when they first came to us.  As has been published elsewhere, Adobe has helped create that ENPS panel inside of Premiere Pro to show off the ‘run down.’

Hearst sees a lot of value in support of open formats, the performance of 64-bit and the Mercury Playback Engine and Adobe’s approach to creating open work flows.

As we close out 2010 and look back on the success of Adobe’s CS5 thus far, it bodes well that large broadcasters like Hearst and others are investing in Adobe to help supply the next generation of news editing for their stations.

I’ll be doing an overview of CS5 for the assembled people and taking questions.  I love doing these kinds of things because I can be there to help people get answers to the questions that are really important to them.  So, if that’s you, I hope you’ll stop on by.  The details are on the link below.

NPVA.org

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

Vimeo.com is the first place where I will publish. If you want to see the tuts as quickly as possible, this is the place to go. My channel is Adobe Beginner Classes

Adobe TV is a scheduled link where I will post one episode about every week or so. There’s always a lot of content there, so it’s good to space it out.

itunes is constrained based on upload size and cost, so my podcast will generally be the last place to get it, but obviously it’s a convenient way to view and take it with you.

That being said, here’s two episodes that are currently only on vimeo:

Episode 36 – Animating a still Part 1

Episode 36 - Animating a still (Part 1) from Dennis Radeke on Vimeo.

Episode 37 – Animating a still Part 2

Episode 37 - Animating a still (Part 2) from Dennis Radeke on Vimeo.

One of the coolest things about this episode after the long hiatus is that it is now HD. Most likely you will see the stream as MED for medium when you view it at Adobe TV. You can change it to HD and it’s at 2MB/s or so. Sweet! Here’s the link: ABC Episode 35

You can also check out the same thing at Vimeo.

Let me know what you think – I’ve already got a few more in the pipeline as a kind of mental catch up…

Cheers,
Dennis

Adobe recently purchased Omniture and so our analytics and SEO (search engine optimization) are all being done via Omniture.  It took me a bit to set it up, but my analytics dashboard is looking good.

As for Adobe Beginner Classes episodes, I’ve spent my spare time setting up my new rig (an HP Z800) to be my Adobe TV box.  I updated to Camtasia Studio 7 (sorry, no Captivate yet and I’m just used to Camtasia now) and determining how new episodes will look and debugging Camtasia.  I’ve got one nasty bug with them currently that crashes the program on exit.

Test recordings are done and it looks like I will be departing from my expansive 1920×1200 screen and making it more modest and readable at 1280×720 so that whatever way you consume the media, it will be viewable and useful.  My only wish is that LCD monitors would neatly display resolutions other than their native one!

The first episode will be a conclusion to my last one (done nearly a year ago! aiya!) and wrapping up a basic Encore tutorial on how to create a new menu with Photoshop.  The new one will show the basic concepts for creating your navigation and then a quick dip into After Effects for ideas on how to animate the menu for a more professional look.

Other than that, I have some suggestions from my previous blog post that was also put on ProVideoCoalition and a whole page of ideas with mini-series of tuts along with a bunch of other fun goodies.  I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Back to work,

Dennis

To prove it, I thought I’d quickly outline some of the places I’ll be and much more to the point, I hope to meet many of you over the coming months.  I must say I always appreciate it when someone comes up to say, “I read your blog” or “I like your tutorials.” Hey, everyone like a little affirmation, right?

So, without further ado, here’s where I will be:

Boston – RULE Broadcast – 9/8

Seattle – 9/16 event with Apple (details – TBD)

Minneapolis – 9/21 – Event with Apple, I know it’s at or near Digital Pictures

New Jersey – 9/28 – NJ FCP users group – It’s up in North Jersey.

Beyond that, I’m planning on trying to stay home for the month of October in order to develop a bunch of tutorials and blog articles.  I continue to welcome ideas or input on either.  Thanks!

Actually, I never forgot about it and I’ve put in entries now and again, but working for Adobe, you’ve got to focus on what’s most important and sadly, though I love it, the blog languished and the petals fell off of the blossom.Well, I’m not out of the woods yet and I can’t remember ever being more busy than I am right now.  HOWEVER… I am resolved to get back into the blog.

Why?  Simply put – you.  Many of you have commented and taken the time to tell me that you’ve gotten something out of it, or asked a question or whatever.  Helping people is one of the most rewarding things that I can do for Adobe and while I’m not perfect at it (or even consistent), I’m glad to be getting back into this.

BUT..THERE’S..A..PROBLEM..

In addition to getting back into the groove, connecting Contribute to the blog, learning how to use Omniture, etc., there’s the idea of content.  What do you want?

Really – what do you want from this blog?  What do you want from Adobe Beginner Classes on Adobe TV?

One of the things I’m going to be doing is some informal and probably biased reviews of some gear.  You can see that there’s a new category called Reviews.  I’m planning on doing some reviews of the equipment I get to play with and pass on some of my off beat thoughts and comments.

Anyway, you get the idea.  So I hope that you’ll comment here, post something on Twitter (@TheGenesisProj) or do some sky writing in a piper cub in whichever city I’m visiting.  Okay, maybe the last one is tough, but I’d be impressed!

Let me know and as always, thanks for your support.

Dennis

One of the sites that I really appreciate is fxphd.com  Their focus has been about advanced training and focusing on things that you wouldn’t normally find elsewhere.  Lets face it, there is a lot of focus on certain products or certain techniques, but fxphd has generally tried to carve out a niche with advanced topics and a college semester approach. 

Among the very best Premiere Pro editors around is Tim Kolb. In addition to being a former Creative Cow contributor, he has been a long time Premiere Pro user who really knows the product and has helped the community with training from Class on Demand and online via the forums.  Tim has lent his expertise to fxphd and is now teaching Premiere Pro on the site. 

So, if you’re ready to take your editing to the next level or find out what the hub bub is about Premiere Pro CS5, then you might consider a small investment in taking the course that is being taught now.

Perhaps another way to title this blog entry is. “Who wants to win a free copy of Production Premium?”

Click here to take the survey and thanks!

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