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.

Here is a recording of the session.

You can watch Möbius here: http://vimeo.com/31525127

Möbius was shot using a prototype of the new Canon EOS C300 camera and was edited using Adobe Premiere Pro with effects shots produced using Adobe After Effects.  Also integral to post production process were Adobe Story, Adobe Photoshop Extended and Adobe Media Encoder.

Here are some highlights from Jon’s presentation:

Adobe Story

> Plays nicely with other popular screenwriting tools such as Final Draft
> The collaboration features of Adobe Story allowed Jon and his co-writer Justin Hamilton to share the script, mark up and make comments and have a dialog about needed changes.
> The outline view lists scenes and uses color-coded dots to identify characters used in each scene. This feature helped Jon’s team save money by identifying a scene requiring a single actor that could be rewritten to instead not use that character.

Adobe Premiere Pro
> Editorial started with 18 hours of source material and a tight schedule so editor Vashi Nedomansky was able to pass Adobe Premiere Pro project files back and forth with other team members to help identify selects and speed the editing process.
> Other NLEs would have required the C300’s Canon XF media to be transcoded before it could be edited, but Adobe Premiere Pro was able to work with the media natively so no transcoding was necessary.

If you want to learn more about Adobe Premiere Pro, check out these resources:

• Premiere Pro resources for Final Cut Pro and Avid Media Composer users
• FAQ: How do I learn Premiere Pro?

In this Ask a CS Pro session, Richard Harrington will provide an introduction to the Timeline panel in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Richard will demonstrate basic editing techniques, such as insert, overwrite, ripple, and roll edits. He’ll then move on to demonstrate the more advanced and powerful features in the Adobe Premiere Pro Timeline panel, including using a replace edit, creating custom transitions, and using Adobe Dynamic Link to exchange files with Adobe After Effects and Audition.

Click here for information and to register for this online seminar.

About Richard Harrington:

Richard Harrington is the founder of RHED Pixel in Washington, DC (http://www.RHEDPixel.com). Richard is the co-author of the new book and DVD, An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro. He is also the host of Creative COW’s Premiere Pro video podcast. To find out more, follow Rich on Twitter @rhedpixel or visit his blog (http://www.RichardHarringtonBlog.com).

Join us this Friday, 26 August, at 12 noon Pacific Time in our Connect Room:
http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/askcspro

(session start time for other time zones)

The room will open 15 minutes before the session starts. At this time, please sign in as a guest to join.

About Colin Smith:

As Senior Solutions Engineer DMO with more than 14 years of experience at Adobe, Colin travels across North America evangelizing Adobe software to individuals, corporations, and professional associations. Mr. Smith is a certified Adobe expert in Acrobat and Creative Suite. He is a frequent speaker at Adobe’s customer seminars, providing tutorials for business communicators, graphic designers, print professionals, and video and audio producers and editors. He also appears regularly on television and radio stations in major cities in Canada, including CP24 in Toronto, A-Channel in Ottawa, and CKNW in Vancouver.

Mr. Smith also works closely with law enforcement agencies to leverage Photoshop and other Adobe technologies to fight crime. An avid music composer, video producer and photographer, Colin expresses his artistic voice through multiple media: music recordings, web sites, and digital photography and video.

Join us this Friday, August 12th, at noon Pacific Time in our Connect room.

(session start time for other time zones)

The room will open 15 minutes before the session starts. At this time, please sign in as a guest to join.

The session will be recorded, and the recording will be made available soon after the session ends.

Prior to the session, you can review these resources to help editors familiar with Avid and Final Cut Pro to learn Adobe Premiere Pro.

About Al Mooney
Al Mooney is the product manager for professional video editing at Adobe Systems Incorporated. He is responsible for defining, delivering, and supporting the overall feature set and functionality of Adobe Premiere Pro. Prior to this position, he was the Senior Business Development Manager for video and broadcast in the UK for Adobe. Before that, he worked for Apple as a Pro Video business development manager and for DigiDesign (part of Avid Technology) as a European sales specialist.

Andrew’s tutorials, especially, go far beyond just showing the UI controls in a specific piece of software. He also gives great advice that’s relevant to color correction with any tool, such as working in a room with constant lighting and frequently resetting your eyes to real-world neutral by looking away from the computer screen.

This eSeminar is free so mark your calendars for Friday, August 5, at 12 p.m. PT in the Adobe Connect Room: http://my.adobe.acrobat.co​m/askcspro. The room will open up 15 minutes before the session starts. At this time, please sign in as a guest to join.

Session start time for other time zones are here.

About Carey Dissmore:

Carey Dissmore is a television and media production professional with 25 years in the business. His work spans the broadcast news, entertainment, advertising, documentary and corporate ranges. He considers himself an editor first, with a heavy amount of motion graphics design as well. He uses an enormous number of tools but the biggies are Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects and the full Adobe suite. Carey is currently working on shows for Food Network and Spike TV, while also designing, editing and animating a series of corporate and medical projects.

Carey founded the International Media Users Group and the MediaMotion Ball at NAB, establishing it as a strong user community event that has been running since 1998. He is active on the MediaMotion IMUG and AE email lists that he helps administer.

Carey is principal of Carey Dissmore Productions, Inc., based in Minneapolis, MN.

Over the last few years, we’ve been working really hard on our NLE.  Way back in April 2010 we shipped our CS5 version, a natively 64-bit cross-platform application built on the Mercury Playback Engine. It was designed to make the absolute best out of modern computational resources, CPU and GPU optimized to its very core. It was a big and bold move in a crowded NLE market, but we felt we had the right foundations in place to start turning a few heads. And turn a few heads we did.

Last month, we shipped a major update to CS5 in CS5.5. I always talk about CS5.5 as building finesse on the solid foundations of CS5, and that was our aim. We had the engine and the chassis of a race-winning car, and now we needed to make it easier to drive. We did. We focused efforts on smoothing the path for people moving over from other NLEs, or those just trying out a new one. And more heads turned.

Then, last week, Apple shipped Final Cut Pro X. I’m not here to comment on Apple’s intentions or strategy, and I won’t. But I can say this: I’ve read and heard that many editors felt alienated with the release. And I didn’t have to look far to hear the disgruntlement. It’s all over the web. It ate my Twitter feed for two days. It was on Conan. It was actually on Conan.

And as a result, understandably perhaps, even more heads have turned to look at Premiere Pro. It’s a powerful NLE that’s intuitive to existing editors. It can open your Final Cut Pro 7 projects via XML. It supports all of your media natively. It performs beautifully, and it lets you edit the way you’ve learned to, using shortcuts you know and paradigms you’re comfortable with.

But the most important thing I want to say to all the newly turning heads is simply this: Adobe is committed making a modern, powerful, useable, professional NLE. In fact, we’re developing harder and faster than ever before. We will continue updating and improving Premiere Pro with regular, timely releases. We’ll continue striving to improve performance, to offer the best native format support possible, and to make the pure experience of just editing – in the way that you’ve learnt to – as intuitive and creative as possible.

I expect that the more you experiment with Premiere Pro, the more you’ll tell us where you’d like it to go next. There will always be bumps on the learning curve with an application new to you, just as there will be things you didn’t have before and wonder how you lived without. I just want you to know that we’re listening to you, the editors, and we aim to continue building an application that you love and can rely on.

This is going to be fun.

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.

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).

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.

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:

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).

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.

The 5.0.3 update also includes performance enhancements to further improve the experience of switching between Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and other applications, as well as other user interface, stability, and performance enhancements that make the Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 editing workflow even more efficient and robust. For a full list of enhancements, check out Adobe Premiere Pro team’s blog post that highlights the 5.0.3 update. 

More and more Final Cut editors are using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 to make them more efficient. If you’re wondering if Adobe Premiere Pro is really worth the switch, check out the four-part web series (replay links are listed below) featuring Final Cut editors and how and why they use Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. You’ll learn the real story on Adobe Premiere Pro’s Mercury Playback Engine, what it means to edit DSLR footage natively, and how you can remove bottlenecks in your pipeline when working with Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. To follow up the series, check out the Q&A session to see if your burning questions were answered.

Don’t forget to check out the resources we have for Final Cut and Avid editors here making the switch to Adobe Premiere Pro. We have also created a 7-part video series that answer a ton of questions. Check it out on AdobeTV. For information on hardware support, we have a special site just for that purpose and even have benchmarking data to give you the real scoop on Mercury. Finally, for all things revolving around HDSLR video editing, Adobe has created a site that is full of free video tutorials and tips & tricks.

To my surprise, Chris has recently become a “switcher”. That is, someone who formerly used another editing tool and has made the decision to switch to Premiere Pro CS5. Lately, he’s been working with a ton of DSLR footage and the workflow for editing it in Final Cut Pro is too painful. Chris simply doesn’t have the time to transcode his footage just to start working on a project. Chris’ reasoning is that Premiere Pro CS5 provides tools to get his job done more quickly and smoothly than Final Cut Pro can.

Chris has recently released a series of videos about the switching process on his website. Although he can be a bit brash in talking about its quirks, I think that Chris gives a very honest assessment of the tools and features found in Premiere Pro CS5. Check out Chris’ website and look at the left hand column for links to all the videos and commentary. If you’re a switcher too, I think you’ll find the videos valuable. By the way, you can also follow Chris on Twitter.

Are you thinking about switching too? We’ve posted a web page for switchers on Adobe.com. There are a bunch of resources to help you with the transition.

Got a switcher story to share? Let us know!

I’ve added this tutorial series to the resources that I recommend in my overview post for beginners: “Getting started with After Effects (CS4 and CS5)”.

One of the things that makes this series stand out from other tutorials is that it spends a lot of time on fundamentals of animation and motion graphics, not just on the specific features of After Effects, and not just on the creation of a specific result or look. These fundamentals can be used every day, for every project. This is real teaching.

Here’s a quick summary of the highlights of what each episode shows:

Episode 1, Animation and compositing basics
> overview of terminology, workflow, and user interface
> basic animation of layer properties
> RAM preview

Episode 2, Animation technique and keyframe interpolation
> overview of keyframes and animation
> keyframe interpolation

Episode 3, Masking and duplicating layers
basic compositing
> introduction to masks
> duplicating layers

Episode 4, Parenting
> null object layers
> parenting

Episode 5, Precompositions and master compositions
> composition settings
> precompositions
> introduction to effects
> changing and animating masks
> layer stacking order
> In and Out points

Episode 6, Photoshop to After Effects workflow
> working with Photoshop and After Effects
> preparing and importing Photoshop documents
> anchor points

Episide 7, Final touches and rendering
> markers
> navigating nested compositions
> moving and tweaking keyframes
> adjustment layers
> basic color correction and adjustment
> rendering and exporting

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.  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