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Filed under: Distribution •Editing •Interactive •Motion Graphics •NAB 2010 •NAB 2010 Insight •Pre-Production •Production •Visual Effects •Web Video •

Adobe Community Leaders Summit

Last week, Adobe invited a variety of well-known people in the industry to come get a closer look at what they’ve been working on, and to provide feedback on their direction. To Adobe’s credit, this was no “preaching to the choir” session; many of those invited were FCP and Avid editors, and several current users gave Adobe personnel an earful both publicly and privately. It was also made clear to us that no specific product versions or release dates were being discussed, and that we couldn’t repeat anything that had not already been mentioned publicly (reminds us of the old Zen Buddhist saying “Those who know don’t say; those who say don’t know”). However, this event gives us an excuse to aggregate into one place a number of emerging technologies Adobe has already murmured about, for those who haven’t had the chance to keep up…

64-bit OS Will Be Required for Video

As Simon Hayhurst (then Senior Director of Product Management, Dynamic Media) said a few months ago, “CS4 will be the last version of Adobe’s leading video applications to support 32 bit operating systems.” That means if you are looking to outfit or upgrade a computer that you plan to use to run whatever will be the next release of After Effects, Premiere Pro, et al will be, you will need to install a 64-bit OS on it (Mac OS 10.5.7 and later work; 10.6.x is better; Windows versions needs to explicitly say “64”). Adobe has additional recommendations on their web site.

Adobe has a white paper on the subject; the benefit that will jump out and excite many After Effects users is no longer being restricted to 2-4 GB of program address space. Let’s hope this will truly be the end of “could not allocate image buffer” and other related out-of-memory issues. (By the way, Adobe also claims CS4 video applications will run better today on 64-bit operating systems.)

Need to Upgrade to 64-bit Plug-Ins

Let’s get the rest of the potentially bad news out of the way: If you’re using third-party effects, as Michael Coleman (After Effects Product Manager) mentioned last month, you will need to upgrade them to 64-bit native versions in order to use them with the next generation of 64-bit native Adobe video applications.

Do not assume this is a trivial matter; assume you will have to pay an upgrade fee. How hard this will be will vary from plug-in to plug-in, and seems to be connected to how “custom” the plug-in is in user interface and system calls. That said, we’ve been surveying After Effects plug-in vendors, and - despite some loud complaints from a select few - we have been very pleasantly surprised with how well prepared most seem to be. Part of this can be attributed to Adobe releasing the SDK (software developer’s kit) much sooner than normal for a new version of software.

Adobe Mercury Playback Engine

The other big video-related technology you may have heard of already is the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, demonstrated using a “future release” of Premiere Pro. We’ve heard a lot of confusion over what Mercury is or is not; let’s try to unravel some of this.

Mercury is a technology that optimizes realtime playback by using a combination of your computer’s CPUs and the GPU on specific NVIDIA graphics cards. Assuming you have a fast enough hard drive to serve up the media (doesn’t have to be too exotic - four drives striped using a software RAID works well for many applications), you can think of four simultaneous 4k RED .r3d streams, multiple channels of P2, H.264 or AVCHD clips, etc. It is important to note that pre-transcoding is not required, and multiple media formats may be mixed on the same timeline. Additionally, a healthy number of plug-ins - including color correctors and keys - have been GPU-accelerated to also run in realtime, stacked on top of those clips:

To get maximum performance, Adobe and NVIDIA have identified a select number of CUDA-enabled cards: the GeForce GTX285, Quadro FX 3800, Quadro FX 4800, Quadro FX 5800, and Quadro CX. If you’re building a system now and want to plan ahead to take advantage of Mercury, make sure you use one of these cards; get another card, and all bets are off. That said, as this “future release” of Premiere Pro is not yet shipping, we would not be surprised to see this list to grow (for example, the Quadro FX 3800 was just recently added).

Note that Mercury works on both Mac OS (10.6.latest) and Windows. If you have one of the above cards, the CPU load is relatively light while the GPU on the video card does a lot of the heavy lifting. If you don’t have one of the above blessed cards, Mercury can run in software-only mode, at which point it is going to be limited by the power of your CPUs. That said, I’ve heard impressive first-hand reports of what even current MacBook Pros can play. It is also only logical to assume we’ll see Mercury demoed at NAB 2010 (as it’s already been shown at IBC).

Mercury is currently written to take advantage of NVIDIA’s CUDA technology. There were inquiries at the meeting concerning supporting the newer, more open OpenCL standard; Adobe is well aware of this - it’s just that OpenCL was barely a spec on a piece of paper when they started work on Mercury. The other advantage of currently limiting Mercury to a select few CUDA-empowered cards is to ensure a uniform experience (i.e. no rendering differences) across cards. The clear desire is to be less exclusive in the future.

Note that Mercury is presently a Premiere-only technology; it currently won’t accelerate After Effects - it’s all about realtime playback (and accelerated rendering). And, as some skeptics have noted, it doesn’t change the way Premiere Pro edits - you either like its paradigm, or you don’t. But this raw speed will certainly make Premiere Pro more attractive to those who are less religious about the way particular features are implemented.

next page: script-to-screen workflows; last page: extruded text & easier interactivity

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Adobe teases Prelude at the San Francisco Supermeet, FCPUG changes its name Scott Simmons | 01/28 The Adobe sneak looks intriguing. Makes me excited for CS6. From the looks of Twitter last night there were a couple of surprises at the Friday evening’s San Francisco Supermeet. First bit of news I saw was that Final Cut Pro User Group (FCPUG) has decided to drop the Final Cut Pro designation from their name to become the Creative Pro User Group. Second was a sneak peek from Adobe about a new application called Prelude.

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It’s great to hear Adobe is listening to the users of their software to some extent. I’m really excited that AE will no longer be “RAM challenged”. I’d like to see them add the 3D extrusion factor to AE and not just Photoshop. I am concerned about having to upgrade all of my third party plug ins. It has taken years for me to collect them all and to have to lay out hard earned cash on the same plug ins to upgrade them might mean having to leave some behind. Flash seems to be dying a slow death with HTML5 coming soon, so I’m not sure why Adobe would waste time developing it further. My greatest hope is that AE will soon have a 3D capability built in instead of having to use Photoshop to “port” 3D models. It seems that Adobe does this just to keep Photoshop necessary. The truth is that I seldom find myself using Photoshop these days. A great article, thanks for the update.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  02/05  at  08:38 AM

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If Trish and Chris not talk anything about next version of AE, apart of wishes of users, then is truth that the next version is weak, only 64 bits and possibly a bit more. I expected a decent 3D system with visible grid and basic primitives… It is a pity.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  02/05  at  05:03 PM

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“If Trish and Chris not talk anything about next version of AE, apart of wishes of users, then is truth that the next version is weak”

No, it’s not true at all.

We can only talk about what has already been released to the public. Nothing about the next version of After Effects (aside from the 64-bit issue) has been released to the public. Therefore, we can’t talk anything any possible future features in AE, no matter how great they may or may not be.

Don’t assume silence is either good, or bad. Silence just means: we’re not allowed to say anything.

“Those who know don’t say; those who say don’t know.”

- Chris

Posted by Chris Meyer  on  02/05  at  05:34 PM

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