The Moving Picture: CS4 at 64

EventDV by Jan Ozer

As you’ve undoubtedly heard, Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) Production Premium delivers some awesome productivity benefits, particularly the ability to send Premiere Pro sequences to both the Adobe Media Encoder (AME) and Adobe Encore for rendering or authoring while continuing to edit in Premiere Pro. Perhaps what you haven’t heard is that this capability significantly increases CS4’s memory requirements. If you’re upgrading from CS3 to CS4 on a 32-bit operating system, this can mean longer rendering times, instability, or both. If you want CS4’s features without the performance penalty, you should consider running CS4 on a 64-bit system.

Why does CS4 need more memory? Since AME and Encore can process Premiere Pro projects separately, Adobe had to create a behind-the-scenes application that renders the Premiere Pro sequences and sends the frames to AME and Encore. If you run Windows Task Manager while CS4 is rendering, you’ll see a program called PProHeadless that performs this function. This program consumes about 200MB of RAM. In addition, since AME now runs as a standalone program, its memory requirements have also increased. read more...