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Adobe Creative Suite 5 First Look

Apr 12, 2010 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

Today, Adobe revealed Creative Suite 5 (CS5). Like many members of the press, I've been working with beta software for about three months, and I am very familiar with the additions to Premiere Pro, OnLocation, Media Encoder, and a couple of ancillary programs, which I'll detail here. For information about After Effects, Photoshop, or other programs in the suite, you'll have to look elsewhere.

At a high level, the improvements to this corner of the suite concentrate in two areas: performance and metadata. Let's talk performance first. Since the Apple iPad shipped about two weeks ago, there's been a general surfeit of glowing adjectives on the Internet and in print, and we've all become somewhat immune to terms such as "amazing," "fantastic," and "astounding" (let's call it the "iPad effect"). So I'll be objective and descriptive, rather than literary.

Specifically, if you're working with H.264-based footage, such as footage shot with the Canon EOS 7D or AVCHD camcorders, you could see a drop in rendering time of as much 95 percent. Specifically, in one of my tests, which involved a 20-minute ballet audition video, rendering time of the 7D footage dropped from 84:45 (min:sec) to 3:57 on a 12-core HP Z800. At the risk of adding to the iPad effect, that's simply astounding.

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New Performance Features in Premiere Pro CS5

What produces this speed increase? Three components: the Mercury Playback Engine; graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration; and a new, much higher-performance H.264 codec from third-party codec vendor and Adobe supplier MainConcept. Briefly, the Mercury Engine is a brand assigned to a collection of three software improvements: 64-bit native code, the greater memory addressing that this enables, and superior multiple-core CPU use. Yes, you can only run CS5 on a 64-bit system (as has been reported for awhile now) and you'll need gobs of RAM—I'd say at least 16GB, perhaps as much as 24GB—to really see the benefits. More on that below.

The second component, GPU acceleration, only works if you have a supported Nvidia graphics card in your computer (check the Adobe website for compatible cards). Depending upon where you look, GPU acceleration has been described as part of the Mercury engine, and has also been called CUDA technology, since that's Nvidia's brand for the underlying technology. Here's Wikipedia's explanation:

"CUDA (an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing architecture developed by Nvidia. CUDA is the computing engine in Nvidia graphics processing units or GPUs that is accessible to software developers through industry standard programming languages. "

Basically, that means that CUDA lets software developers such as Adobe access the graphics card to accelerate certain functions, such as preview and rendering. New in Premiere Pro CS5 are little icons to the right of some effects that tell you whether they are accelerated, or work in 32-bit or YUV space. If they are accelerated, and you have the right Nvidia card in your system, the GPU will render the effect when you apply it to your project, generally in realtime. You can see all the color-correction-related effects that are accelerated in Figure 1; in addition, the new Ultra greenscreen that Adobe added to Premiere Pro is also accelerated, as are overlays like titles, scaling effects (such as picture-in-picture effects) and many others.

This means that you can apply these effects and preview immediately, without rendering (I know, that's redundant, but I'm trying to avoid adding to the iPad effect by being painfully clear). Perhaps even more important (and pay attention here), the GPU accelerates the application of these effects during rendering to your final output format. So assume you're producing a project for 720p upload to YouTube in H.264 format, and you've applied the Fast Color Corrector effect, an Ultra chroma key effect, a title, and a picture in picture or two.

In CS4, Premiere Pro would have to render these effects using the computer's CPU before handing off the rendered frames to Adobe Media Encoder for rendering to H.264, which could (and often did) take hours. In CS5, with a supported Nvidia graphics card, the GPU does all this work, generally in realtime or faster, speeding the process and freeing the CPU for other tasks. To be clear, in both versions, Media Encoder is taking the rendered frames from Premiere Pro (or PProHeadless, the background program that steps in for Premiere Pro to perform such renders), and producing the H.264 file using solely the CPU, but the rendering of the timeline itself to hand off to Media Encoder is GPU accelerated in CS5.

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