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SNEAK PEEK: Adobe Mercury Playback Engine
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16 Replies
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Dave…
Can I just say…
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
🙂
This technology has been on my radar for years….glad to see it’s finally maturing to a point where we can take advantange of it.
Now for a Mercury play back engine for AE.
🙂
Alex
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Interesting, clearly. I was hoping to see this happen in FCP7 but we weren’t that lucky. CS5 might be when I jump and try a new editor (Premier CS4 doesn’t quite feel ready for prime-time, at least not on the Mac).
I wonder if this technology will suffer from the same limitation say Motion has. For some projects the GPU acceleration is amazing, for some it’s just a limitation (i.e. horrible rendering times). I like the above poster would love to see this technology also merge into AE as much as possible.
It’s a bit sad they go with CUDA as their code-base but I guess OpenCL wasn’t really ready at the time this started to be developed.
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Erik Lindahl
Freecloud Post Production Services
http://www.freecloud.se -
Brings up another interesting point…
Is the playback engine of PPro moving to the point of being in the 3rd party development API?
If so….it potentially opens the doors to allowing development on many platforms (like Open CL if needed) as they come along without necessarily waiting for Adobe to do the rewrite of the code base.
I suppose as Matrox has been doing this for quite some time….it must in some way be open to 3rd party development.
Alex
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Yikes – the rendering speed alone could save weeks of waiting per year.
The CUDA gpu looks to be about $1700.The real time-ness of native formats is just what the doctor ordered, and makes me think maybe you don’t need an I/O card after all, but what about monitoring on an HD monitor? You would still need a way to get the output via HDMI, component or SDI out…?
Mike Cohen
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Some of the NVIDIA’s have an SDI/HDSDI option….
Check out PNY
Alex
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You can get a GeForce GTX 285 card for about 350.00 . This card was recently discountined but there are plenty out there. This card does quite well. Out via HDMI will popular for sure for many people still need SDI I/O or HDMI in. Many of our 3rd party vendors will be working with early betas to prepare their drivers as well.
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Eric, good observation on Open CL not being ready in time. CUDA is largely based on Open CL and we’ve been working on this 2 years. As Open CL gets more mature we will certainly look at it. We need to keep everything as cross platform as possible.
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so you don’t need the top shelf CUDA card depicted in the Adobe video in order to get the “silky smooth” playback of native formats?
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I might be missing something… but, I’m running CS4 with an NVidia 280 video card with virtually NO drag on an XP 32bit system (w/ 10 track layers of unrendered* work area video) using Canon HV30 m2t HD video. For me (see detail comp.specs below), it seems the Mercury Playback system would not be much of a plus unless we are talking 2k or better video and/or multi-camera editing of HD (…perhaps DSLR video as well?). And, if I compare this some other editing software I use I actually have had this capability to efficiently handle native HD files with NLE’s that are about 3+yrs. old.
I not saying that this isn’t a good idea… I’m all for increased speed (..but, I’m typically more concerned about stability)… . it’s just that I have this capacity now with out a 64bit system and can use my 32bit third party plug-ins. It seems this is only paving the way for the future 2,4,5K video and for typical 1920/1440 HD video the additional gain may be limited.
Joe
detail computer specs.:
WinXP, ASUS W6T6 WS Rev., Intel i7 3.2Ghz 8X32bit CPU, 6G Corsair DDR3 (low lat.) RAM, GeForce GTX 280, LG DVD, Realtek AC97 Aud., Adaptec 5405 RAID SAS controller for 2 Stripes of 2xHD 15k rpm Fujitsu 300G ea.,2×20″Samsung 204t* side note: For me, working in rendered work area’s (as apposed to unrendered) doesn’t add much to the editing speed but typically will not work and FREQUENTLY results in a “media pending” problem… in effect, HD work area renders are not very stable and reliable.
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Hey Joe…
Take a couple of those layers, and add some rotation, and perhaps a feathered edged mask…..
hit play and see what happens….
My guess is it won’t be quite so snappy…..
Alex
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