Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 improvements in CUDA processing and the Mercury Playback Engine

Adobe.com by Todd Kopriva

Before you read this post about what’s new and changed regarding CUDA processing in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5, I recommend that you read this post about what CUDA is and what the Mercury Playback Engine is for Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.

OK, so now that you’ve gone and read about CUDA processing in Premiere Pro CS5, let’s move onto what’s new in Premiere Pro CS5.5.

We have a few more effects and transitions that are accelerated by CUDA:

• Film Dissolve
• Additive Dissolve
• Invert
• Directional Blur
• Fast Blur

The Film Dissolve transition is new in Premiere Pro CS5.5. It’s a dissolve transition that blends in a linear color space (gamma = 1.0). In simple terms, that means that it blends in a more realistic way; basically, dissolves look the way that they should. That’s not a CUDA-specific thing; I just thought that I’d call it out since this is the first time that I’ve had a chance to describe the effect.

We’ve added many graphics cards to the list of cards that provide the CUDA processing features in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5. Below is a list of the cards added in this version. For a complete list, not just the list of changes in this version, see this page.

• GeForce GTX 570
• GeForce GTX 580
• Quadro FX 3700M
• Quadro FX 3800M
• Quadro 2000
• Quadro 2000D
• Quadro 2000M
• Quadro 3000M
• Quadro 4000M
• Quadro 5010M
• Quadro 6000

You’ll notice that there are a lot more cards for laptops now. (They’re denoted by the M at the end of the card number.)

One category of accelerated processes is very important but not really obvious in the user interface, as the accelerated effects are. I’m talking about various aspects of media preparation and footage interpretation. There’s a lot of processing that goes on behind the scenes when you’re bringing media of various types, sizes, frame rates, pixel aspect ratios, and so on into a sequence. Premiere Pro CS5.5 accelerates many more of these kinds of processes than did Premiere Pro CS5.

Premiere Pro CS5.5 accelerates processing for dealing with the following kinds of characteristics of mismatched media:

• frame rate differences
• field order differences
• pixel aspect ratio differences
• frame size differences
• media with different alpha channel representations

Related to the above, frame blending and speed changes (including time remapping) are accelerated.

Similarly, processing of footage interpretation is accelerated for changes in frame rate, pixel aspect ratio, field order, and alpha channel interpretation, as well as pulldown removal. Interlacing and deinterlacing are also accelerated.

Premiere Pro CS5 was unable to use more than 4GB of RAM on the GPU (VRAM). Premiere Pro CS5.5 can use more than 4GB of VRAM.

For more about what’s new and changed in Premiere Pro CS5.5, see this blog post.