CS5 GPU acceleration for encoding?

[Alex Udell]

It is my understanding that both is possible.

enhanced editing and accelerated export to some specific formats using NVIDIA hardware.

Alex

[Joe Marler]

My testing with Premiere Pro 5.0.1 on an nVidia GTX-275 with GPU acceleration enabled shows encoding of Blue Ray, DVD and Flash is not accelerated. Yet those are the three formats nVidia says ARE accelerated for encoding via GPU hardware.

My card is admittedly not on Adobe’s approved list, but GPU acceleration is enabled using the usual procedure involving cuda_supported_cards.txt. It greatly accelerates effects, and it obviously accelerates exporting if effects are used.

However it’s the effect rendering aspect of export that is accelerated, not the encoding itself.

There is a remote possibility an approved card like a Quadro might accelerate encoding, but I doubt it.

The previously-listed nVidia statement about GPU acceleration of encoding seems to be marketing speak, as the same video describing GPU acceleration of encoding eventually says it only happens if effects are used. IOW a back-handed way of saying encoding is NOT accelerated, only the effect rendering is.

Encoding is so time-consuming, people are obviously motivated to expedite it however they can. They could read the nVidia headline claiming GPU encoding acceleration, buy an expensive GPU, then be disappointed. It appears (in the current 5.0.1 version) that *only* effects are accelerated.

If anybody knows otherwise, please explain. Maybe someone with a Quadro could do a quick export test to Blu-ray, DVD or Flash with GPU acceleration on then off, restarting CS5 in between.

[Brian Louis]

<>Yet those are the three formats nVidia says ARE accelerated for encoding via GPU hardware.<>
AFAIK that is only one card out of the group that does RealTime editing acceleration and thats the Quadro CX

[Angelo Lorenzo]

nVidia acceleration does support encoding, but not through Adobe Media Encoder.

You have to open your project into Premiere, go to File > Export > Media. This will open the normal export window you’re use to seeing so set your output settings. At this point you can do two things, you can export or enqueue to Adobe Media Encoder.

You need to export directly from this window while it is open in Premiere to take advantage of the encoding acceleration.

I use a hacked GT240 with 1gig of ram and I’ve seen a threefold increase in encoding time with 1080p30 footage in H.264 even with moderate adjustments (3-way color, luma curves, gamma, transitions, etc)

[Martin Tsai]

Thank you for this post, Lorenzo. I wasn’t even thinking of exporting from within Premiere (always used AME). tried and got a surprising result: 4.4 times faster!

I use a GTS250 nVidia card. The GPU utilization jumps to 70%, 80% … from only 2% when encoding in AME.