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Adobe CS5 Production Premium and HP hardware is the fast line - always!

During the recent National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to present Adobe Creative Suite 5 in the HP booth. I was very excited to get my hands on a fully loaded HP Z800 Workstation and test just how fast Premiere Pro CS5 and After Effects CS5 would run; seeing as we are now able to take advantage of 64-bit memory. The Z800 was running Windows 7 64-bit, topped with 24GB DDR3-1333 RAM, a gorgeous 10-bit Dream Color display, Dual 6-core Westmere processors, NVIDIA’s Quadro FX 5800 graphics card and an HP StorageWorks X1000 Network Storage System that left every customer’s jaw on the floor.

Creative Suite 5 Production Premium and Adobe’s video demonstration files were also loaded. The Adobe demo is a real-world set of projects, video formats and graphics that was built to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Production Premium. Included in the demo are native formats for RED R3D, Canon 5D mkII, Panasonic AVC-Intra, JVC mov, DVCPro-HD, DPX files and assorted graphics formats in Photoshop, Illustrator, JPEG and PNG.

Now I’ve been presenting these demo files for several months, so I am very familiar with the speed of my current laptop and how it performs with these files. What I haven’t had the opportunity to do though is take them for a ride on hardware that is screaming fast. And this HP hardware is screaming fast!

First up when presenting to the steady stream of customers was getting them familiar with the new Adobe Mercury Playback Engine. The Mercury Playback Engine functions both in software and hardware modes. The Z800 with Westmere processors proved to be more than adequate to playback multiple layers in real time in Premiere Pro. This demo alone had customers shaking their heads in disbelief as the sheer power and native file support, is something Final Cut Pro and Avid users are not familiar with. Even current CS4 users were surprised as the Mercury Playback Engine is new to CS5.

But the fun started when I began to switch to Mercury Playback Engine hardware mode and show the power of both CPU and the NVIDIA GPU acceleration. At this point I opened the mother of all projects; put together for Adobe by the brilliant film house Bandito Bros. This project consisted of 9 layers of DVCPro-HD footage, with effects on each layer AND a live chroma keyed layer of R3D footage keyed out with the new Adobe Ultra keyer built into Premiere Pro CS5. Let’s remember that the audience at NAB is a selection of professionals, many who have been in this business and felt the pain of waiting for renders to complete for years on end. When I pressed the Space Bar on the keyboard to start real-time playback, I got the same reaction each and every time which could be described as a silent “deer in the headlights” look of wonder. If you can imagine the face of a child who just caught their first look at Santa Claus in their living room, then you can imagine what I saw time and time again for two days in the HP booth and NAB. It was almost sinful to relish these moments but there we were in Las Vegas, the city of sin, and customers were being shown that their world changes today. You could almost see the dollar signs in their eyes—and I’m not talking about spending as much as saving.

At this point, I had to wait and allow them to catch up with what they were seeing; which is being touted as “game changing technology” by our customers. To add a little more unbelievability to the demo, I then explained that every single video file that they were seeing playback in real-time, was actually four feet away on the HP storage solution connected by 10Gbit Ethernet to the Z800. That’s right, as amazing as this whole story is, we were not playing back local media! It’s important to state we were using a prototype tower version of the HP StorageWorks X1400 Network Storage System. I should also state that Adobe does not test on this hardware (as yet) but it performed flawlessly the whole time I used it.

Next up was After Effects CS5, which everyone knows can bring any hardware to its knees in terms of rendering and RAM previews. Again, customers (and me) were completely surprised at the speed they were seeing. I have never used the word “butter” when talking about After Effects but I was using that word now. I was showing RAM previews of native R3D files and AVC-Intra files that were so fast to render on the timeline that for the first time, the little green line that shows rendering progress, was giving customers a warm and fuzzy feeling instead of the frustration of a slow line at the supermarket. Just ask yourself how many times you’ve interrupted a RAM preview because you couldn’t wait any longer or you’ve changes lines because you think the other cashier is faster?

Adobe CS5 and HP hardware is the fast line - always!


With dwindling budgets, shrinking timelines, and projects that need more WOW for less money, film and video professionals are looking for ways to make magic happen. And it becomes instantly apparent that their current world of rendering is not going to help them survive in the years to come. Adobe Production Premium CS5 represents the most comprehensive set of tools for the film, video and audio world. In any creative field, the goal should always be about being creative and not about becoming an IT specialist who is constantly herding media in and out of formats and wasting time.

The simple yet seemingly illusive dream of editing native files in real-time on affordable desktop hardware is available today, and I’m certain that many customers I talked to at NAB will be seeing that benefit as soon as CS5 ships.

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Where are all the FTC disclosures?
There must be a couple pages worth for this “story”

It’s just f-ing pathetic when advertising
masquerades as journalism on this otherwise useful
website.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  04/28  at  04:50 PM

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