SNEAK PEEK: Adobe Mercury Playback Engine

[Dave Helmly]

Alex – you’re guess would be wrong…. 😉

[Alex Udell]

Dave…

I should have been more clear….
Joe was saying he’s able to play multiple layers today…PIP boxes straight up are pretty easy to do….

I was suggesting that he those changes on his existing system….

I have very little doubt that Mercury would rip thru that no sweat! 🙂

Alex

[Joe Moya]

Better than that… with unrendered work area HD, I can throw color correction or better yet… Magic Bullet Looks with Mercalli Motion Stabilizing and some 2D text animation… and, I get no additional drag. Moreover, same can be said with video previews set at Max Bit depth and Max Render Quality (although a “max bit and quality” slows a workspace render significantly…but I can work just as fast with render as I can without).

The key? As best I can tell the speed is gained mostly with a REALLY fast RAID 0 setup with the fasted HD’s made and really fast raid controller…. and using just about the fastest and most $$$ CPU available doesn’t hurt either.

I am sure there may be some advantage to the Mercury Playback Engine… but, at this point and based on what little was shown in the review… I don’t see a lot of advantage of going to a 64 bit system (and loosing use of my rather significant investment in third party plug-ins) when I have a 32 bit system doing just about the same thing.

All that said… I do have major stability problems. Adobe PP loaded with many tracks and plug-in effects will most likely freeze or crash during render, can’t consistently build a preview frame for Looks, and when rendered I almost ALWAYS get the “media pending” gold screen, and will find various plug-ins and transitions will cause all kinds of stability problems at random… but, then again that also happens when I have single track of HD video. On the contrary, I find almost none of these same problems with same HD video source (using similar or exact plug-ins) don’t exist with After Effects, Avid Liquid, Avid MC or Vega.

[Eric Jurgenson]

The most exciting thing for me is seeing the revamped export media window. Dave is rendering WITHOUT HAVING TO SEND TO AME. Thank God Adobe is addressing one of the most screwed up features in CS4. (I hope I’m not missing something here).

[Dave Helmly]

Eric,

I’ll be the first to agree that waiting for AME to launch from Premiere when all you need is a quick export is a pain. The CS4 trick is already have AME launched and then it’s pretty fast to queue. Once you use the Render Queue feature in CS4 (if you need multiple outputs) – it’s great.

One thing I often have to explain is why it takes soooo Long to load some projects – It’s basically reloading all assets, titles, filters (and so on) to each Queue – for example, you can have several layers with titles , each in a different language, and you turn off/on the language you need with each queue allowing you to quickly create assets for multi lingual projects. The same goes for filters like Color Correction settings or any filter.

Yes – you did catch a few of the “goodies” we are working on. “Instant Export” was missed in CS4.

DKH

[Eric Jurgenson]

Ha ha, I love the irony. To be truthful, you should call it “Instant (compared to AME) Export”.

Hey, I was happy with “Export Movie”, and some of us fondly remember “Export to DVD”.