Technology Sneek Peek: Adobe® Mercury Playback Engine

Lets start with the big, bold, brash, brazen, big-time, blow-your-mind (are there any other ‘big’ adjectives I’ve missed?) statement about the Adobe® Mercury Playback Engine: It is a game changer.

Haven’t heard about the Mercury Playback engine yet?  Good - 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.

Premiere Pro 4.2 & AVC-Intra

The new Premiere Pro CS4 4.2 and Adobe Media Encoder CS4 4.2 offer new improvements and enhancements to CS4 video workflows. With the 4.2 update, Premiere Pro now offers users of Panasonic’s AVC-Intra line of P2 cameras the chance to edit in native AVC-Intra format. This has been a longtime coming for AVC-Intra users and they can now enjoy the advantages of Adobe CS4 tapeless workflows and native editing. Several other enhancements to Premiere Pro 4.2 were also updated, like the support for Final Cut 7 import. I have outlined several of the updates and fixes below. I have also listed the “known issues” in 4.2 as well.

Page 1 of 1 pages