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Filed under: Post Production •

Technology Sneek Peek: Adobe® Mercury Playback Engine

Question: “What makes all of this ‘crazy’ stuff possible?”

Answer: It is a combination of different things.  Really, this is a great example of where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  What are the parts then?  It’s 64-bit native code, greater memory addressing, fantastic CPU optimization and finally NVIDIA CUDA technology.  Every one of these is critical, absolutely critical to making the future of non-linear editing better and more powerful than ever before.  Multi-core goodness and memory addressing are already hard at work in Premiere Pro CS4.  The 64-bit native code has been announced and now we bring in NVIDIA CUDA technology to be the icing on the cake and a powerful new engine to squeeze out performance in Premiere Pro.  Before I wax philosophic on GPU, let me officially tip my hat to the incredible engineers at Adobe and their work here for the Mercury Playback Engine.  Their passion, intelligence and outright cunning is what’s making this possible.  Bravo!

On NVIDIA: I’ve always been a fan of NVIDIA and their Quadro product line has a huge market share in the professional graphics card industry, so it makes a lot of sense for us to partner with them to provide the horsepower behind this new technology.  In addition, NVIDIA has been deeply involved in helping make this happen because like us, they know the customer and try to deliver the technology to enable more powerful and flexible workflows.

Question: “Why should I care about this?”

Answer:It’s a fair question.  Ultimately, the harnessing of the GPU provides Adobe with another way to fulfill a key strategic goal when designing our products: namely, removing the need for a user have to wait for the software to catch up to their creative vision.  Another way to think of it from Adobe’s perspective is that we already have great multi-processor CPU utilization, where can we get more power for the customer?  The answer is CUDA and hence the Mercury Playback engine.

One other aspect to this is the rate of innovation on GPU development.  While CPU’s from Intel and AMD continue to evolve and grow, the rate of innovation has slowed down dramatically.  This hasn’t been the case for GPU development.  We continue to see dramatic leaps in performance every 12-18 months.  The Quadro XXXX of today will be the GeForce of tomorrow and that means that your performance on a given system will be able to develop rapidly over time at a much lower cost than ever before.

Question: “I don’t do 10 layers of video Dennis, how does this help me?”

Answer: Okay, but as we see more people doing digital film, working with RED 4K files (with bigger on the way), as well as complex, temporal based codecs such as AVCHD, the idea of harnessing the GPU in addition to the CPU promises benefits for nearly everyone.  Plus, while you may not do 10 layers of video at any one time, most people are using basic color correction, levels, curves and many other things on a regular basis.  I think Mercury will help you even if you’re just using a couple of layers.

Question: “Are there any downsides to this technology?”

Answer: I guess it depends on your point of view but my ‘net-net’ answer is no, there is no downside.  A more pragmatic and perhaps nuanced answer is ‘depends’.  If you’re an ATI fan, you know that CUDA is NVIDIA products only and consequently, you’ll either do without this feature or you’ll switch to NVIDIA.  Adobe has a valuable relationship with ATI/AMD and we’re looking at things like OpenCL, which is a cross-platform GPU approach to what CUDA is.

Question: “Why didn’t you use OpenCL then?”

Answer: OpenCL wasn’t finished or ratified when this decision was made.  Given a choice between doing it with CUDA or not doing it for a while because of OpenCL, we chose the former.  Besides, as I mentioned, NVIDIA has a hugely dominant market share in the professional graphics market, so we think that most people will be comfortable with the options available to them.

Question: “Will you support OpenCL in the future?”

Answer: Clearly this is an answer for someone higher up to answer, but my hunch is that we’ll certainly look at it in the future as it aligns with our goals of being open and non-propietary.

Question: “Anything else I should know?”

Answer: Yes. The list of approved GPU cards will be limited initially to ensure that we have a consistent experience for our customers.  Obviously this begs the question of which cards are you going to support?  I think the answer here could be a moving target but two cards that I’ve been told will be supported are the GeForce GTX 285, the Quadro FX 4800, 5800 and the Quadro CX.  I’m currently doing my testing with the Quadro 4800.  The GeForce GTX 285 card should be one to really look at as it’s street price is only about $300.00 and provides a real value to users that are looking to get the maximum bang for the buck.

Lest you think that you Mac folks will be left out, you’ll notice that both the GeForce GTX 285 and the Quadro 4800 are both available for Mac…and so is the Mercury Playback Engine!

NVIDIA has announced that new cards will ship in early 2010 and I don’t know how that will impact which cards we support, but our general goals will be to a) provide consistent GPU performance across the cards we support b) support as many cards at as many prices as possible.  My hunch is that the initial list will be small, but we’ll do our best to expand upon that in future.  With new cards on the way, I wouldn’t run out to buy a card now unless I had to, but if you do, at least you have a good sense of what will be supported.

In addition, I don’t think there will be any approved laptop GPU processors as most of them are designed to be for laptops and just don’t provide the kind of horsepower to make a real difference.  This bums me out as I typically demo and present on a laptop, but the engineers and product management are telling me that there just isn’t enough juice to get a real sizeable performance difference out of them.  Again, this probably changes over the course of time.

Seeing is believing and I hope that you’ll have the opportunity to see the Mercury Playback Engine in action some time in the future.  I know if I’m the one presenting it to you, that I’ll be excited to show it!

Adobe,Technology,sneek peek,future,Premiere Pro,Mercury Playback Engine,CUDA,64,native,performance

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Im so curious about the sound.. And less usage of CPU the other plus..

Posted by ilan  on  04/23  at  05:57 AM

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