(Page 1 of 3 pages for this article  1 2 3 >)

Filed under: Distribution •Editing •Interactive •Motion Graphics •NAB 2010 •NAB 2010 Insight •NAB 2010 Post •Pre-Production •Production •Visual Effects •Web Video •

Adobe Community Leaders Summit

In late January, Adobe invited a variety of well-known people in the industry to come get a closer look at what they’ve been working on, and to provide feedback on their direction. To Adobe’s credit, this was no “preaching to the choir” session; many of those invited were FCP and Avid editors, and several current users gave Adobe personnel an earful both publicly and privately. It was also made clear to us that no specific product versions or release dates were being discussed, and that we couldn’t repeat anything that had not already been mentioned publicly (reminds us of the old Zen Buddhist saying “Those who know don’t say; those who say don’t know”). However, this event gives us an excuse to aggregate into one place a number of emerging technologies Adobe has already murmured about, for those who haven’t had the chance to keep up, and want an idea of what they might see at NAB 2010.

64-bit OS Will Be Required for Video

As Simon Hayhurst (Senior Director of Product Management, Dynamic Media) said a few months ago, “CS4 will be the last version of Adobe’s leading video applications to support 32 bit operating systems.” That means if you are looking to outfit or upgrade a computer that you plan to use to run whatever will be the next release of After Effects, Premiere Pro, et al will be, you will need to install a 64-bit OS on it (Mac OS 10.5.7 and later work; 10.6.x is better; Windows versions needs to explicitly say “64”). Adobe has additional recommendations on their web site.

Adobe has a white paper on the subject; the benefit that will jump out and excite many After Effects users is no longer being restricted to 2-4 GB of program address space. Let’s hope this will truly be the end of “could not allocate image buffer” and other related out-of-memory issues. (By the way, Adobe also claims CS4 video applications will run better today on 64-bit operating systems.)

Need to Upgrade to 64-bit Plug-Ins

Let’s get the rest of the potentially bad news out of the way: If you’re using third-party effects, as Michael Coleman (After Effects Product Manager) mentioned last month, you will need to upgrade them to 64-bit native versions in order to use them with the next generation of 64-bit native Adobe video applications.

Do not assume this is a trivial matter; assume you will have to pay an upgrade fee. How hard this will be will vary from plug-in to plug-in, and seems to be connected to how “custom” the plug-in is in user interface and system calls. That said, we’ve been surveying After Effects plug-in vendors, and - despite some loud complaints from a select few - we have been very pleasantly surprised with how well prepared most seem to be. Part of this can be attributed to Adobe releasing the SDK (software developer’s kit) much sooner than normal for a new version of software.

Adobe Mercury Playback Engine

The other big video-related technology you may have heard of already is the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, demonstrated using a “future release” of Premiere Pro. We’ve heard a lot of confusion over what Mercury is or is not; let’s try to unravel some of this.

Mercury is a technology that optimizes realtime playback by using a combination of your computer’s CPUs and the GPU on specific NVIDIA graphics cards. Assuming you have a fast enough hard drive to serve up the media (doesn’t have to be too exotic - four drives striped using a software RAID works well for many applications), you can think of four simultaneous 4k RED .r3d streams, multiple channels of P2, H.264 or AVCHD clips, etc. It is important to note that pre-transcoding is not required, and multiple media formats may be mixed on the same timeline. Additionally, a healthy number of plug-ins - including color correctors and keys - have been GPU-accelerated to also run in realtime, stacked on top of those clips:

To get maximum performance, Adobe and NVIDIA have identified a select number of CUDA-enabled cards: the GeForce GTX285, Quadro FX 3800, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX 5800, and Quadro CX. If you’re building a system now and want to plan ahead to take advantage of Mercury, make sure you use one of these cards; get another card, and all bets are off. That said, as this “future release” of Premiere Pro is not yet shipping, we would not be surprised to see this list to grow (for example, the Quadro FX 3800 was just recently added).

Note that Mercury works on both Mac OS (10.6.latest) and Windows. If you have one of the above cards, the CPU load is relatively light while the GPU on the video card does a lot of the heavy lifting. If you don’t have one of the above blessed cards, Mercury can run in software-only mode, at which point it is going to be limited by the power of your CPUs. That said, I’ve heard impressive first-hand reports of what even current MacBook Pros can play. It is also only logical to assume we’ll see Mercury demoed at NAB 2010 (as it’s already been shown at IBC).

Mercury is currently written to take advantage of NVIDIA’s CUDA technology. There were inquiries at the meeting concerning supporting the newer, more open OpenCL standard; Adobe is well aware of this - it’s just that OpenCL was barely a spec on a piece of paper when they started work on Mercury. The other advantage of currently limiting Mercury to a select few CUDA-empowered cards is to ensure a uniform experience (i.e. no rendering differences) across cards. The clear desire is to be less exclusive in the future.

Note that Mercury is presently a Premiere-only technology; it currently won’t accelerate After Effects - it’s all about realtime playback (and accelerated rendering). And, as some skeptics have noted, it doesn’t change the way Premiere Pro edits - you either like its paradigm, or you don’t. But this raw speed will certainly make Premiere Pro more attractive to those who are less religious about the way particular features are implemented.

next page: script-to-screen workflows; last page: extruded text & easier interactivity

(Page 1 of 3 pages for this article  1 2 3 >)

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Smileys

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below: