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remember the old days!
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No, Adobe Premiere Pro works around Quicktime whenever possible, which is significant when you’re discussing overall performance. So for example, H.264 we don’t need Quicktime whereas FCP 7 does. With something like ProRes though where the codec doesn’t reside anywhere but within Quicktime, Premiere Pro must use it. However, I will note that several people (and my own findings) have said that Premiere Pro performance on ProRes is better than FCP 7. At worst, it is on par. Hope this helps.
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[Dennis Radeke] “I’m curious if there are any other reasons or thoughts about why FCP X might be faster.”
Err… that article is frankly a little questionable. It breaks down the Mercury Playback Engine into three components — 64-bit memory addressing, 64-bit processing, and GPU acceleration, and then insists that you still get two of the three even without an NVIDIA GPU.
This is fairly screwy.
64-bit addressing offers no performance benefit unless performance was previously limited by RAM available to the app. Now, there are some algorithms where the ability to use more RAM during processing can speed things up… but this mostly doesn’t apply to video. The post seems to be kind of vaguely implying they need the extra RAM to enable multithreaded processing, but frankly that’s a little questionable. Most processing of video can work with frames one at a time, and individual video frames aren’t all that big. There might be some significant benefit here with a few filters, but I doubt the overall difference is very large. Think about it like this: do you really think throwing 8 GB of RAM at Premiere Pro makes it even twice as fast as it is with 4 GB? While there are rare exceptions (e.g. databases where more RAM means you never have to hit the disk), most software tends not to work like that.
Meanwhile, 64-bit processing can result in significant speedups… if you’re processing lots of 64-bit integer data. Which is not common, and not really applicable to video processing. The highest quality at which video is commonly processed is 32-bits/channel, and that’s usually 32-bit floating point data, not integer data at all.
x86-64 does have an odd quirk relevant to this, however. x86 has always been register-starved, and AMD (everyone forgets AMD came up with x86-64 while Intel was off fooling around with Itanium) took the opportunity to add more registers with the new spec. This provides certain general performance benefits, but they’re not huge. We’re talking in the range of 10-20% here for the most part — not the difference between “spend all day staring at progress bars” and “you do’t have to render anymore”.
And then there’s the GPU, which for tasks suitable for GPU processing can result in processing dozens or even hundreds of times faster. That really can be the difference between “spend all day staring at progress bars” and “you do’t have to render anymore”.
So while you might be getting 2/3 of the “bullet points” of the Mercury Playback Engine without GPU acceleration, you’re probably getting less than 1/10 of the performance enhancement.
Meanwhile, FCP X will offer GPU acceleration on every Mac with discreet graphics, e.g. the Mac Pro plus the iMac, and the 15 and 17″ MacBook Pro models. And next year with Ivy Bridge, OpenCL should even be supported on Intel’s integrated GPUs, which means every Mac Apple sells will be able to benefit from GPU acceleration in FCP X before too long.
Now, maybe Adobe is at work furiously creating a parallel implementation of Mercury for OpenCL. But, well, we’ll see.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “Err… that article is frankly a little questionable.”
I apologize because I made an assumption here. I am the author of that ‘screwy post’ and I work for Adobe. I incorrectly figured everyone already knew that…
[Chris Kenny] ” It breaks down the Mercury Playback Engine into three components — 64-bit memory addressing, 64-bit processing, and GPU acceleration, and then insists that you still get two of the three even without an NVIDIA GPU.”
Well, I hate to be dogmatic, but this is a fact – including the last part. If you have a problem with it, then well…there’s no point in continuing the discussion. 😉
[Chris Kenny] “The post seems to be kind of vaguely implying they need the extra RAM to enable multithreaded processing”
I didn’t mean to be vague. More RAM = better performance in most cases, whether directly or indirectly. In a 32-bit app world people were used to having 8 cores and 4gb of addressable memory (like FCP 7). With 64-bit applications and computing, you want to have plenty of memory so that your CPU’s can work at peak efficiency. Here’s a nice article from Adobe’s Todd Kopriva about starving your CPU’s in AE: https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2009/12/performance-tip-dont-starve-yo.html
[Chris Kenny] “There might be some significant benefit here with a few filters, but I doubt the overall difference is very large. Think about it like this: do you really think throwing 8 GB of RAM at Premiere Pro makes it even twice as fast as it is with 4 GB?”
Twice as fast, no. Increase the overall edit experience, smoothness, ability to use your CPU’s at 100% usage 100% of the time, etc.? Yes. Actually, I recommend 16GB of RAM for many situations. Also, there have been tests by users (on the Windows side) that with some codecs there is a directly correlation to performance to memory. So in some cases, yes twice the memory means twice the performance…
I could go on but lets agree that you’re not going to buy in to what I’m saying. It’s obvious that you’ve not tried a native 64-bit editing application and until you do (FCP X), you won’t see the benefits.
You are pre-disposed to FCP and that’s okay. For others that may have questions about Apple/Adobe workflows, I am here to answer questions.
Dennis – Adobe guy
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[Dennis Radeke] “I didn’t mean to be vague. More RAM = better performance in most cases, whether directly or indirectly. In a 32-bit app world people were used to having 8 cores and 4gb of addressable memory (like FCP 7). With 64-bit applications and computing, you want to have plenty of memory so that your CPU’s can work at peak efficiency. Here’s a nice article from Adobe’s Todd Kopriva about starving your CPU’s in AE: https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2009/12/performance-tip-dont-starve-yo.h...”
I’m aware of the general principle, I’m just very skeptical about whether being able to use, say, 4 vs. 8 GB of RAM really makes much difference for multithreaded rendering of things like color correction filters, lower thirds, etc. — the nuts and bolts things that editors want to be faster.
[Dennis Radeke] “Twice as fast, no.”
Well, this is my point. Even “twice as fast” is a pretty small speedup compared with the typical performance increase associated with moving a suitable task to the GPU, and the performance benefits associated with 64-bit addressing and process don’t even provide that. I’m not saying you guys shouldn’t have been bragging about being 64-bit before Apple, but it’s misleading to sort of imply you get 2/3 of the Mercury Playback Engine without an NVIDIA GPU, when you don’t get anything close to 2/3 of the performance enhancement.
[Dennis Radeke] “I could go on but lets agree that you’re not going to buy in to what I’m saying. It’s obvious that you’ve not tried a native 64-bit editing application and until you do (FCP X), you won’t see the benefits.”
I expect most of the performance benefit of FCP X also won’t be directly related to the fact that it’s 64-bit.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read Does FCP X make project files obsolete? on our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “I’m aware of the general principle, I’m just very skeptical about whether being able to use, say, 4 vs. 8 GB of RAM really makes much difference for multithreaded rendering of things like color correction filters, lower thirds, etc. — the nuts and bolts things that editors want to be faster.”
You’re right – so try it for free then… https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=premiere_pro
The above trial includes ALL codecs for 30 days so you can do a side by side comparison of Premiere Pro CS5.5 with FCP 7 and eventually FCP X. Build the same timelines on all and see which comes out on top. Then you can be informed.
[Chris Kenny] “but it’s misleading to sort of imply you get 2/3 of the Mercury Playback Engine without an NVIDIA GPU, when you don’t get anything close to 2/3 of the performance enhancement.”
Regardless of whether you think it’s misleading it is FACTUALLY TRUE and I can’t be any clearer than that. Like I said, give it a fair try and if nothing else, you’ll be more informed about your decision.
More importantly, I think you miss the main point – it’s about balancing your tasks between the CPU and GPU. If you dump everything to a GPU, you’ve just moved the problem. So, this is why we moved effects over to the GPU but left the bulk of decoding and playback to the CPU.
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