Adobe CS5 Premiere Pro and After Effects Review
Videomaker by Brian Peterson
Significant improvements to key performance areas make CS5 a must-have upgrade for serious video producers.
By now, you have heard about some of the important new improvements in the Adobe CS5 Production Premium suite. If you haven't, check out our recent coverage reviewing the highlights. In this review, we are going to focus on the key performance improvements in the core application you use most, Premiere Pro, along with another look at After Effects.
Creating test procedures and interpreting results can easily morph from simple to rocket science. Don't worry, we aren't going to get overly technical, but to understand the results, it's important to know the tests setups.
Our test computer is an 8-core 2.33 GHz Intel Xeon system with 32 GB of RAM and an nVidia Quadro CX graphics card. We installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 64-bit, loaded all the updates and latest drivers then installed CS5 Production Premium and defragged our one system and four project array drives. Our hard drive array read transfer rate averaged 182MB/s with a 16.3ms average access time. As you can see, this machine, while robust, is not the fastest box out there, so the benchmarks we note shouldn't be limited to the experience of just a few speed geeks.
To get the most out of CS5, you may need to get a new nVidia graphics card. In case you are not able to do this right away, we ran identical tests in CS5 with and without GPU acceleration. We also ran the same tests in CS4 just to give you a sense of the relative performance improvements.
Finally, and we are only going to say it once, your results may vary. read more...
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