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FCP X GPU acceleration?
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[Dave LaRonde] “Actually, an Nvidia card that speeds up Premiere is useless in After Effects. It doesn’t help at all. I’m not at all surprised, either.”
Not quite. It may not be of the scale of GPU acceleration in Pr, but it’s significant nevertheless.
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[Dave LaRonde] “Perhaps you can then explain to me why every Adobe Employee I have ever spoken to keeps Open GL acceleration turned off for all rendering.”
OpenGL accel and multi-processor rendering support don’t work together so software rendering will be faster and possibly more accurate than OpenGL-assisted one – especially on fast multi-core machines. There are other issues as well.
This does not mean OpenGL does not offer a productivity boost – especially for previews.
Bottom line, this statement:
[Dave LaRonde] “Actually, an Nvidia card that speeds up Premiere is useless in After Effects. It doesn’t help at all”
… should probably be adjusted to say:
1. GPU (OpenGL) acceleration is much more limited in AE vs. Pr but not useless.
2. It helps primarily in previews and may help with non-final renders
3. It’s not advisable to use OpenGL acceleration in final renders in AE.Alex (DV411)
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DaVinci Resolve used CUDA only before.
Now also uses OPEN CL.I’m sure FCP X will scream on GPU, all cores and all the ram.
Who knows maybee you can add future Thunderbolt iMacs in the chain aswell!! -
[Paul Jay] “DaVinci Resolve used CUDA only before.
Now also uses OPEN CL.”I like the idea of OpenCL – it just appears that NVidia is further ahead in the performance curve:
“OpenCL based processing, while not as powerful as CUDA™ processing also used on DaVinci Resolve, does allow a much wider range of computers that can be used for color grading.”
Alex (DV411)
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[Chris Kenny] “I wouldn’t characterize it as “rampant speculation” to say that an entirely new rendering engine probably uses recent technologies in the places where it’s appropriate to use them.”
You’re right – I was just spooked by continuous repeating of “probably” around unconfirmed bits of news.
Plus, there are many examples of amazing technologies getting killed or withering in obscurity – and that includes background rendering among other things.
In other words, Apple’s implementation of GPU acceleration could fall far behind Adobe’s, or could be roughly equal to it. Or, it could get far ahead – which I personally find highly unlikely based on what I heard of OpenCL.
The fact is, at the moment Apple is far behind and everything else is speculation.
Alex (DV411)
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[Erik Lindahl] “Decoding of codecs on the GPU built into QuickTime “
Not necessarily required as it has been whispered that QT is no longer the core media wrapper that FCP bases all of its image transactions on. FCPX may well turn out to be media agnostic. This would be a good thing.
jPo
You mean “Old Ben”? Ben Kenobi?
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[Chris Kenny] “Compared with Avid, Adobe is doing a lot better on the GPU/multicore front. Their Mercury engine already has capabilities similar to what Apple seems to be introducing…”
I think this is where you’re going a bit far. You’re making assumptions based on no evidence. Apple showed us nothing at that demo to underscore that it had a sophisticated GPU actually working. They mentioned OpenCL once if memory serves (I was there) and did not mention any hardware acceleration of effects or playback via the GPU. I think it’s your wishful thinking, but the actual product may in fact be exactly what you describe.
[Chris Kenny] “the catch is that Adobe is using CUDA, not OpenCL, so Mercury only works on a handful of NVIDIA GPUs, whereas FCP X should be able to take significant advantage of GPU acceleration on most modern systems.”
Again, until you know what you have with FCP X, it’s is unfortunately just speculation. It is indeed true that Adobe Premiere Pro is based on CUDA technology and not OpenCL. It should be pointed out though that when CS5 was introduced, OpenCL was just ratified to say nothing of actual implementations. It is also fair to say that OpenCL is mostly a subset of what CUDA is as ATI/AMD evidently did not have as mature a language and in working with NVIDIA adopted much of what became OpenCL. Adobe is looking at OpenCL carefully for future versions, but as of now, Premiere Pro utilizes NVIDIA CUDA technology exclusively.
One final point on this. I work primarily in the broadcast markets and NVIDIA dominates this market by a very wide margin. Often it is because of the relative power of the solution. Here is an example I found in about 10 seconds: Tom’s Hardware
[Chris Kenny] “And then of course there’s ProRes, where Apple was already well ahead of the competition. Adobe has no answer to ProRes (surprised they let Cineform get acquired by GoPro; it would have solved all of their problems), and Avid’s DNxHD has neither the range (offline through 4:4:4) nor the third-party device support that ProRes has. You can now shoot, edit, color grade, and in some cases even deliver a feature film (an indie, anyway) without ever leaving the ProRes format.”
This is of course a differentiation between Adobe and many other companies. A DI codec still has uses to be sure, but when you can natively handle all media (including ProRes) the actual need for a DI for 90%+ of users is probably nil. If you can shoot, edit, color grade and in some cases even deliver a feature film (an indie, anyway) without ever leaving the native format, I’d say you’re doing just fine without a DI. In fact, I’ll go one further in saying that you can output a DPX file (for film print) via Adobe Media Encoder without any additional plugins.
Can you poke some holes in the above? Probably, but my point remains. A DI is more useful when you do not have a native workflow. BTW – just because GoPro purchased Cineform, doesn’t mean you can’t purchase Cineform for Premiere Pro if you want a DI workflow. People do it all of the time for specific workflows.
I’m excited about the time we live in and the great choice of products that users have access to and I look forward to more lively discussions about the best tools for the best stories in the future.
…And in case you didn’t know already I am…
Dennis, the Adobe guy
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[Dennis Radeke] “I think this is where you’re going a bit far. You’re making assumptions based on no evidence. Apple showed us nothing at that demo to underscore that it had a sophisticated GPU actually working. They mentioned OpenCL once if memory serves (I was there) and did not mention any hardware acceleration of effects or playback via the GPU. I think it’s your wishful thinking, but the actual product may in fact be exactly what you describe.”
This is a new, ground-up rendering engine. Anyone writing such an engine today would make extensive use of GPU acceleration. People who are extremely skeptical about Apple’s efforts in this market can insist for the next couple of months that we can’t assume Apple has competently executed on this point because we have no proof, but it’s not especially reasonable to do so.
[Dennis Radeke] “Can you poke some holes in the above? Probably, but my point remains. A DI is more useful when you do not have a native workflow.”
More useful, sure. But it’s pretty useful regardless. We commonly send ProRes files out to transfer houses, for instance. It’s quicker for us to get to an external drive, it’s quicker (read: cheaper) for the transfer house to copy to the RAID on their output system, and it looks great. (We’ve screens projects mastered in ProRes 4444 in high-end DI theaters, and there’s just nothing to complain about.)
Digital Workflow/Colorist
You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Is FCP X a professional app? on our blog. -
[Dennis Radeke] “A DI codec still has uses to be sure, but when you can natively handle all media (including ProRes) the actual need for a DI for 90%+ of users is probably nil. If you can shoot, edit, color grade and in some cases even deliver a feature film (an indie, anyway) without ever leaving the native format, I’d say you’re doing just fine without a DI. “
And that’s me and my work in a nutshell. I’ll go one step further: the ability to use, say, h.264 natively means that a lot of us won’t need those fancy Thunderbolt drives either. AVCHD is around the same bitrate as DV. A good FW800 drive can deliver ~600 mbps. I reckon I could run 10 streams through that and would probably bog down the CPU before I saturated the FW bus. Even better: take an iMac with an i7, SSD at 2TB SATA drive. Running everything from internal drives, the CPU would (once again) be the limiting factor. How limiting will be interesting to see… -
[Alex Geroulaitis] “I like the idea of OpenCL – it just appears that NVidia is further ahead in the performance curve:
“OpenCL based processing, while not as powerful as CUDA™ processing also used on DaVinci Resolve, does allow a much wider range of computers that can be used for color grading.””
One thing to keep in mind is that OpenCL was initially developed by Apple, and based on the timeline it actually seems fairly plausible that it was developed as part of laying the groundwork for Final Cut Pro X.
So it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if there were a difference between what Blackmagic can get out of OpenCL for Resolve, and what Apple can get out of it for FCP X. And it’s also kind of silly to advance the notion that we don’t know if Apple isn’t really using OpenCL for much, in the application it was very possibly developed for or even extracted from.
Digital Workflow/Colorist
You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Is FCP X a professional app? on our blog.
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