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MillimeterAdobe Creative Suite 5 First Look
Apr 12, 2010 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Figure 2. CS5 sings on a multicore computer such as HP's 12-core Z800.
The third leg of the performance stool is a new H.264 codec from MainConcept. Anyone who's ever worked with H.264 source footage in Premiere Pro in the past knows that it can be incredibly painful, especially for those foolish enough to try on a 32-bit computer. In CS5, the 32-bit option in gone, but those with 64-bit systems and lots of RAM will be rewarded with (being careful here) substantial drops in encoding time. For example, with one 53-minute, single-camera AVCHD shoot, rendering to H.264 for upload to YouTube took 3 hours and 47 minutes in CS4, 31:28 (min:sec) in CS5, both on the same HP 12-core Z800 workstation. That's a remarkable difference (sorry, a slip, won't happen again).
Obviously, a big part of that time saving relates to more efficient CPU use. As you can see in Figure 2, CS5 gets the most out of all cores of my 12-core Z800, shown operating with Hyper-Threading Technology (HTT) enabled, hence 24 separate processes averaging 90 percent use. You can also see the genesis of my RAM recommendations—in the Figure, the system was using 14GB, and Media Encoder and PProHeadless were the only two programs running.
Figure 3. Adobe Story, the start of the script-to-screen metadata workflow.
Script-to-screen metadata workflow
The other main aspect of the Adobe CS5 release is the script-to-screen metadata workflow, which starts in Adobe Story, a script-development program that's part of Adobe's new CS Live services, which are online products and/or services that are separate from CS5. Though they're free for now, Adobe may later charge for Story or any other CS Live services.
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You create your script in Story, including descriptive scene-based information and data about the characters. You can export the script into a file that you can import into OnLocation, which preserves all the metadata. You create your shot list in OnLocation, as before, but now you can import clips shot with an untethered camera into OnLocation and link the clips to the shot placeholders, which attaches the metadata to the clip. From there, you can import the clips into Premiere Pro with metadata intact, and pass the script and associated metadata out to Flash during rendering.
There are many little extras in most of the programs; I've already mentioned Ultra, which is a great addition. One thing that doesn't come with the new version is instability. I ran Premiere Pro through 20 or so real-world and synthetic projects during my testing and remember few crashes, if any. Stability is supposedly one of the benefits of 64-bit operation, and it seems to ring true in this case. So CS5 won't overwhelm you with new features, but the performance boost for those editing in or producing to H.264-based formats could truly be startling (sorry, last time) and the program feels at least as stable as the version it replaces, if not more so. In a different time, I would throw a few more adjectives at you, but at this point, I'll just let these facts speak for themselves.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.