Elemental Technologies, the leading provider of massively parallel video processing solutions, today announced the availability of Elemental™ Accelerator 2.2 for Mac, a significant update to its NVIDIA CUDA™ GPU-accelerated video processing tool for creative professionals. Elemental Accelerator works with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac professional graphics solution to add power and performance to the Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 workflow. With Elemental Accelerator 2.2 for Mac, users have access to a wider array of output options than ever before and can achieve significantly faster transcode speeds with support for GPU-accelerated H.264 and MPEG-2 video decoding, processing and encoding.
Elemental Accelerator is a plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4 designed to work with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac’s graphics processing unit (GPU) to radically speed up the processing and delivery of high-quality H.264 and MPEG-2 video files. Leveraging the massively parallel processing power the NVIDIA CUDA architecture, Elemental Accelerator speeds the video processing workflow end-to-end at a lower total solution cost than conventional CPU-only or specialized hardware encoding solutions.
“Video editors are under intense pressure to get a high return on investment from their professional hardware,” said Lisa Epstein, product marketing manager at Elemental Technologies. “With Elemental Accelerator, Mac power users with CS4 and the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac will benefit from faster encoding while freeing up the CPU to perform other tasks.”
Elemental Accelerator performs GPU-accelerated conversion of commonly distributed digital video formats to H.264 files ready for upload to the web or burning to Blu-ray disc. With release 2.2 for Mac, Elemental Accelerator also supports high-speed MPEG-2 encoding for DVD or digital broadcast. The software is easily accessible through either the Adobe Premiere Pro or Adobe Media Encoder application interface. Using the Adobe Media Encoder, Elemental Accelerator can be selected to accelerate the rendering of both Premiere Pro and After Effects sequences and projects.
Release 2.2 adds substantial features to Elemental Accelerator for Mac:
GPU-accelerated decode – NVIDIA GPU-accelerated H.264 and MPEG-2 video decode speeds end-to-end video processing.
Effects rendering and conversion – Accelerate common video effects and transitions as well as linear scaling and frame rate conversion.
Additional output options – Render and encode H.264 video for Blu-ray disc, Adobe Flash, and portable media players or render and encode MPEG-2 video for DVD and digital broadcast.
Enhanced preset options – Choose from an expanded suite of H.264 and MPEG-2 presets to create output suitable for Blu-ray, DVD or web-targeted media.
Multi-GPU support – Divide the workload among multiple NVIDIA GPUs in a single system for a dramatic increase in encoding speed.
“The innovative combination of NVIDIA Quadro with Elemental Accelerator is exactly what Mac video professionals using Adobe CS4 have been waiting for,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group. “This breakthrough solution delivers a productivity boost of up to 4X, enabling greater creative experimentation with the ability to still meet tight production deadlines.”
NVIDIA Quadro FX professional graphics solutions are optimized to enable GPU acceleration across the entire family of Adobe CS4 applications, including Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Flash and Photoshop. From importing files and editing multi-video streams to previewing video content, professionals use Quadro FX graphics to optimize their workflow and enhance the creative process.
Elemental Accelerator for Mac is available through NVIDIA distribution channels and directly from NVIDIA at www.nvidia.com/adobeplugins. It offers the same easy integration with Adobe Premiere® Pro® CS4 as Elemental Accelerator for Windows, while offering 2X-4X performance improvements and time savings over CPU-only encoding solutions. A trial version of the product is available for download from both the NVIDIA and Elemental websites. Release 2.2 is available as a free upgrade to existing customers.