Adobe CS5.5 Production Premium Road Show

Adobe is hosting a free, three-city road show in June. Not only will we talk about the new features in CS5.5 Production Premium, we’re also spending more time on educating you on HDSLR editing and how you can better integrate Production Premium into your existing workflow—no matter which NLE you’re using.

Jim Guerard, vice-president and general manager of Professional Video at Adobe, will also be available to discuss challenges and opportunities facing the production and broadcast industries today and how Adobe is equipped to help you meet those challenges.

If you’re interested in attending this event and want more information, please check it out here.

See how Thunderbolt makes CS5.5 faster at NAB

At NAB 2011, the hot topic around hardware in the South Hall was definitely Intel’s Thunderbolt port technology. Maybe you’ve read about Thunderbolt or had co-worker try and explain it, but the simplest way to understand it is to just find a demo running on the showfloor and take it for a spin.
In the Adobe booth, we put together a complete system running on Apple’s new Macbook Pro 15” connected to a Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt raid array connected to a BlackMagic Design Ultra Studio 3D with SDI output to an iKan portable SDI display. From the description above it sounds like a lot of cables and wiring, but in fact, it’s quite simple. Each Thunderbolt device has 2 ports and are linked together in a daisy chain configuration with very small but sturdy cable. The result was 800MBs throughput of shear madness.
For a quick test, we threw down some 422 1920x1080 Uncompressed footage in Premiere Pro CS 5.5 with data rates between 126 – 158 MBs and started playing the timeline with ease. Next we tested fast and slow scrub and it was silky smooth to the touch- It was like we were playing DV. I’ve never seen anything like it running off a laptop.
We continued putting it through the paces stacking on 3 and 4 layers of video throughout the day and inviting customers to feel the power of this new level of editing. After Effects CS 5.5 also had no problem playing the uncompressed footage in realtime. The Adobe booth appeared to be the only place where you could actually see the full workflow of editing with Thunderbolt.
BlackMagic Design has done an incredible job in being the first to show off this next generation editing platform running on Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and After Effects CS 5.5. I had the opportunity to talk to Pro Video Coalition about it. View the interview here.

Production Premium CS5.5 storms onto the scene.

Welcome to the new reality of 2011 – this industry is changing fast.  Our customers are adapting to the new multi-screen world we live in and learning to thrive and prosper in a world where never before has so much content been created and consumed.  Change happens fast in this world and that is why Adobe is delighted to be at NAB 2011 to introduce a new release of Production Premium—version CS5.5—only 12 months after our landmark CS5 release.

While our users’ goal of telling compelling stories doesn’t change, the reality of making content today is very different than a few years back—the world of tape compared with our file based reality today couldn’t be more different.  Adobe has added the concept of file-based workflows across the entire content creation cycle—from the first moment an idea comes into your head till the last glowing pixel fades on the device the consumer watches it on—Adobe is there. 

We call this “Plan to Playback” and our goal is to provide the essential tools you need across that spectrum (breadth), the specialized tools in specific areas you need to be more productive and creative (depth) and ensure that everything you do goes at full speed and can connect to any other tool you need to (Performance and Openness).

Digital Rebels: The New Generation of Filmmakers & Storytellers

If you’re attending NAB this year, don’t miss Adobe’s panel discussion at 12:00 on Tuesday, April 12 in room S222 called Digital Rebels: The New Generation of Filmmakers & Storytellers to hear from a new breed of filmmakers who are changing the rules for film production and distribution. The panel will be hosted by Johnny Loiocono, SVP and General Manager of Adobe’s Digital Media Solutions business unit.

Defying the big, bloated movie budgets of the past, today’s digital rebels are making their films fast and with surprisingly low budgets. But make no mistake; the caliber and quality of these films is right up there with the best of the best. Featured panelists include Tyler Nelson, Assistant Editor on the smash hit The Social Network among many other high-profile Hollywood projects; Gareth Edwards, an award-winning British filmmaker whose latest project Monsters has received critical acclaim on the global independent film circuit; and Jacob Rosenberg, filmmaker, author and digital media expert who has contributed to many films including Avatar, Superman Returns, and Dust to Glory. The panel will discuss what tools they’re using—such as RED and DSLR cameras, and software that provides integrated solutions and workflows that make this amazing storytelling possible.

Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine & Apple’s new MacBook Pro 17″ with ThunderBolt

Recently I’ve been getting a lot of performance questions from Mac users about using Adobe Premiere Pro editing systems with ATI/AMD graphics cards. No question this has been “sparked” by Apple’s recent series of MacBook Pro Laptops featuring Thunderbolt and a 1GB AMD Radeon 6750 graphics card. I created a video (below) to show you how the Mercury Playback Engine running on the new Apple MacBook Pro 17” Thunderbolt laptop in 64 bit CPU mode or what’s also known as Mercury Software mode. In software mode, Premiere Pro will use its 64 bit playback engine along with OpenGL to give you a great playback & rendering experience. Apple is now finally shipping a fast processor with 8GB of system RAM and 1GB of GPU RAM on a laptop.

Premiere Pro on a Mac – what is the truth?

Premiere Pro CS5 has been a successful release by any measure and many people have come to know about the Mercury Playback Engine.  What’s been less clear is what the MPE really is and what it means for users of both Mac and PC.

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:

CUDA, Mercury Playback Engine, and Adobe Premiere Pro

A few weeks ago, I wrote a forum post to try to clarify some things about CUDA, the Mercury Playback Engine, and what it all means for Adobe Premiere Pro. I wrote this as a forum post because I wanted to invite questions and conversation. But, as forum threads do, it got a little messy, so I thought that I should consolidate the information here.

If you want to ask a question about this subject, please do so on the forum thread, not on this blog post. It’s very difficult to have a conversation in the comments of a blog post

What is the Mercury Playback Engine, and what is CUDA?

Mercury Playback Engine is a name for a large number of performance improvements in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. Those improvements include the following:
- 64-bit application
- multithreaded application
- processing of some things using CUDA
Everyone who has Premiere Pro CS5 has the first two of these. Only the third one depends on having a specific graphics card.

CUDA is a technology (architecture, programming language, etc.) for a certain kind of GPU processing. CUDA is an Nvidia technology, so only Nvidia cards provide it.

Confusingly—because of one of our own early videos that was unclear—a lot of people think that Mercury just refers to CUDA processing. This is wrong. To see that this was not the original intent, you need look no further than the project settings UI strings Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration and Mercury Playback Engine Software Only, which would make no sense if Mercury meant “hardware” (i.e., CUDA).

Optimizing for performance: Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects

In January, a bunch of us from Adobe hosted a one-hour session about optimizing for performance of both Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. In case you missed it, here’s the recording.

We also said that we’d post a set of links for more information about all of the things that we covered. It was a very fast-paced session—or maybe it just felt that way to me, since I was the one doing most of the talking—and we covered a lot of ground. If you want to check out the links, visit my Adobe blog.

If you have any questions, please bring them to the After Effects forum or the Premiere Pro forum. It’s much harder to have a conversation in the comments of a blog post than on the forum.

Also, the most comprehensive place to find information on improving performance in After Effects is the “Improving performance” page in After Effects Help. Much of what is listed above can also be found there, plus much more.

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