ProVideo Coalition.com: Bruce's Blog by Bruce A. Johnson

Adobe CS5 and nVidia: First Impressions Part 2

Bruce A Johnson | 05/31

Or would that be “Second Impressions”?

So far, so good, but the transition hasn’t been perfect. As I mentioned above, my previous Premiere Pro accelerator card was the Matrox RT.X2. To get the best performance from that system, I would record onto Firestore drives in the native Matrox codec, which creates .AVI files that don’t need their accompanying .WAV audio files. Well, guess what – this new system doesn’t know anything about the Matrox codec, and just plays video when you drop a clip into a timeline. And as Murphy’s Law would have it, a client asked me to revisit and update several older Premiere Pro projects that were created with the RT.X2. Because of the codec mismatch, all the video showed up, but none of the audio. And to make matters worse, I had renamed the files in the clip bin to reflect my own scene/take/Firestore number metadata schema. Discovering the original clip names and relinking them with their audio files is a task I never want to go through again. (Going forward, I shouldn’t have to.)

The other thing I really miss is having a dedicated video output from the computer to a video monitor. There seems to be some controversy about this one, though. nVidia press contacts say the only way to use a second monitor for the Program output is to tear the Program monitor off the Premiere Pro program and maximize it on the second monitor (and if you do this, do not forget to SAVE YOUR WORKSPACE so you can call it back again easily.) My 2nd monitor is an LG CRT HDTV, which is being fed HDMI from one of the nVidia’s DisplayPort jacks, through a DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter. When I do the tear-off trick, the Program monitor never quite fills the frame properly, with transport buttons and such keeping the video from being true full-raster (and truth be told, the video looks really crummy this way.) On the other hand, my buddy Lyn Norstad at LNA Associates says that his nVidia/Adobe system does do full-raster playback to a DisplayPort-equipped monitor. Maybe that is the missing link, although I don’t have a DP-equipped monitor to test it on now. And some reports floating around the Web infer that the Matrox MXO-2 outboard box can provide a program output. I hope to get to test that someday soon.

But really, if you have any experience with editing in Premiere Pro before CS5 – especially in 32-bit environment – you owe it to yourself to give the nVidia/CS5/64-bit setup a go. And it’s not just new new feeling of responsiveness, speed and stability in editing – you see it in other places as well. Encoding a timeline to Windows Media used to be a three-times-realtime affair; with the new system encoding to .WMV is about one-third realtime. Yes, it is just that fast.

Coming next time – more kinds of clips for more kinds of projects, and why I won’t be using After Effects to do scan&pan anymore.

————————————————————————————

DISCLOSURE:

NVIDIA sent me a Quadro 4800 card on extended loan to evaluate its performance with a review copy of Adobe Creative Suite 5 and report on my findings to other users, for good or ill… and I’m going to call them as I see them. I paid for the HP Z800 out of my own pocket.

How does Adam make those cool blue boxes??

(Page 2 of 2 pages for this article < 1 2)

Back to Bruce's Blog »

The Editing of “Courageous” Part One

Steve Hullfish | 10/14

The off-line edit of a RED feature film

Last October, I had the rare opportunity to edit a feature film called “Courageous,” which is in theaters now. “Courageous” was the number one new movie the weekend it opened (September…

Check out a Number of Hardware and Software Options from B&H

Jeremiah Karpowicz | 05/16

Everything you need in one place

We grabbed Jerry Zorek, Manager of Business Development at B&H, to learn about what B&H was showing off at their studio booth. He shows us a Resolve system with the…

Final Cut Pro X Multicam Editing webinar now available on-demand

Scott Simmons | 05/15

Plus a little screencast in this blog post on a topic we didn’t get to cover.

I had great fun last week presenting the Final Cut Pro X multicam editing webinar…

You must be registered to comment. This is an effort to reduce spam. Please REGISTER HERE.

Adam makes those cool blue boxes with the <blockquote> tag!

Posted by Adam Wilt on 05/31 at 11:26 PM

I’m using the Quadro fx 3800 with CS5, Win 7, and
I’m getting excellent quality full frame 1920 output to HDTV via a DP/HDMI cable.
It was a no brainer to set up nVidea control panel, and PPro playback settings (as described in the above post) for this.
I’d be amazed if the 4800 would not do this as well, but stranger things have happened.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 06/01 at 12:57 AM

I’d love to read a review of CS5 Premiere without an nVidea/CUDA compatible video card. That is, how much performance is the $1000+ FX 4800 adding?

If I understand correctly, the Mercury engine is only accelerating Premiere. Does it do anything for After Effects or any of the other Adobe apps?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 06/01 at 09:44 AM

Rob, it is possible to turn off the hardware CUDA acceleration in Premiere. Thanks for the tweak - I’ll try that soon and post the results.

As to AE, I’m not sure whether CUDA works in it, but making movies from a comp “feels” faster…

BAJ

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 06/01 at 09:53 AM

@Rob - I’m currently using PPro CS5 w/out one of the cards, and I see better playback then CS4. A lot (I feel) depends on your computer, but on a newer and faster system you should see some really good results. On my i7 1.6 Ghz laptop, I can playback XDCAM EX footage with the Ultra Keyer effect and a BG plate added in realtime. I’ve animated stills and done some PIP with really smooth playback.

As for Mercury Playback in AE, it’s not there - only in PPro. But AE is 64 bit now, so you do get better performance.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 06/01 at 11:41 AM

@Rob -

I’m also running CS5 PPro in software mode only - The performance increase is remarkable - as said above - AE in 64bit is also much more responsive - I have an i7 .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) - and 12 GB Ram - windows 7 64bit

Thanks Bruce for the update.

Posted by Jim Hines on 06/02 at 07:03 AM

Hi Bruce,

I posted a response to part 1 of this referring to the Matrox MXO2 monitor output. For my part, I didn’t get that from reports on the web, inferring it. I got it directly from Matrox.

Matrox is still busy completing certification for MXO2 with CS5 but they’ve had certification with C4 and, if I’m not mistaken, with CS3 too. Monitoring output been one of the selling points of the MXO2 technology, along with the Matrox codecs of course.

Now, though, as I said in my post, as of NAB, Matrox is touting the fact that MXO2 now also accelerates Mercury! Without a Cuda GPU!

I also mentioned that the MXO2 devices also output a true progressive RGB signal, providing complete compatibility with HP’s Dreamcolor monitor and engine (proper scaling included).

I hope you do a review of whole MXO2 option even if you don’t include the Dreamcolor in the mix.

I’ve had a call into Matrox (two actually) trying to get some confirmation re MXO2’s compatiblity with CS5’s multicam functionality. They have not deigned to get the answers I want and get back to me. The people I spoke with couldn’t say because they were not sure and because Matrox is (or was) still certifying.

I’ve been a happy user of the Cineform codec in terms of smooth realtime editing. However, Cineform isn’t compatible with multicam. Cineform informed me that Adobe had closed that section of the API to third-party developers. Ditto from Blackmagic and their codec. It seems to me that a good codec and a fast system would have addressed much of what mercury fixes. But Adobe obviously knew they had Mercury up their sleeve and thus could trump third-party codecs in favor of supporting native editing.

Matrox has told me this: even if you don’t use a MXO2 device to ingest (converting a source into a Matrox codec in the process) you can still playback and externally monitor anything playable from an Adobe timeline.

I have to wonder whether the MXO2 devices can really accelerate Mercury well unless working in a Matrox codec.

And, can we have acceleration of Mercury by way of a Matrox codec AND multicam editing with a MXO2 device?

Thanks again for your analysis thus far.

Posted by wsmith on 06/03 at 09:07 AM

Good news.This is a great post. I like this topic.This site has lots of advantage. I found many interesting things from this site. It helps me many away..So i want some information for sharing this side with some of my friend. Thanks

jaguar parts auto

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 08/13 at 11:47 PM

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Smileys

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below: