which is CS5’s preferred codec for HD editing?

[Tim Kolb]

Well…it does speed encoding and decoding and responsiveness and all those things…it’s just important to note that it does this by handling the effects computation.

The only time when this becomes an important distinction is when someone simply has a computer that can’t get the video decode work done…even without effects (we’ve had a couple of those in the last couple days here). In those cases, CUDA won’t be the difference between being able to play the video back at full frame rate on the timeline and not. It can make the difference between being able to play it back with those specific effects (color correction being a big one) and not as once CUDA picks up that work, more CPU goes to video decode.

The bottom line is that encoder/decoders (codecs) need to be rewritten to thread out into 200, 400, 600 threads and back to run on CUDA…at the moment all the video codecs that I know of are written to run on a CPU.

Adobe rewrote a quantity of effects to run on CUDA, which was the necessary step to getting all that to happen.

Also…GPU acceleration is not the same as CUDA (we have a person who asked about GPU acceleration when what they want to know about is CUDA). GPU acceleration takes care of accelerating visual display functions, computing pixels and texels and shadows and transparency, etc, etc. CUDA actually runs the -executable- application on the GPU cores. The GPU becomes a super-threaded CPU basically.

All of it’s cool and beneficial, but it’s good to understand the differences. For example, After Effects’ GPU accelerated previews or third party plugin makers with GPU accelerated effects are not using CUDA/Mercury…they’re using the traditional GPU functions.

…which actually isn’t all bad as GPU use in general uses any display card with a GPU you put in the computer…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Davd Keator]

Dan: definitely time for an upgrade:
1: use hack and get GeForce 450, more than 460 is overkill unless you want 10bit color support, then qudro 2000 / 4000 max!
2: i7 2600k with 16 gigs: this actually is a hair faster than my 980x CPU!

Cs5 was written with intel in mind, that is until Buldozer falls off the bandwagon! Why does AMD insist on being behind the door when it closes! O_o

3: dual xeon 6580’s with 48 gigs, 34% faster than that 1155 chipset but way way way out there on expense!!!

Hope that helps guide your upgrade path…

[Ken Snyder]

I just read through this thread and was impressed by some of the knowledge on it but it didn’t answer my question so I thought I’d try to tag onto the end of the conversation.

I’m using a fairly powerful computer … an iMac with quad-core and 16gb RAM. I’m running CS6 and I have a AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2048 MB graphics card. WIth this hardware I was hoping to be able to work on the AVCHD video format directly but it is PAINFULLY slow. Should it be? Is there a simple way to check if I’m getting the benefit of hardware acceleration? If it’s not, is Cineform going to produce better results for me? Is that still the recommended intermediate codec?

Ken

[Tim Kolb]

Since your AMD GPU card is not on the compatible list at this time (6750M and 6770M in MacBooks are currently supported), I’m certain you’ll get no hardware GPU help.

In an iMac, you’d need an NVIDIA card…

As I said earlier, even though the AVCHD material is not decoded specifically on a compatible GPU, the GPU picks up a lot of slack in other areas to enable the CPU to allocate more torque to decoding.

All the H264 decoder operations I’ve seen in general use are typically single-threaded (I think Adobe may be distributing the task across CPU cores by frame to get better efficiency), so I’ve found that clock speed on a CPU seems to trump pure core count, at least for H264 DSLR material…AVCHD may be similar in that respect.

CineForm will certainly help…and CineForm Studio is a free download from the GoPro website, so it costs nothing to install. I know the free version of the software loads and transcodes GoPro and other DSLR material, but I’m thinking you may have to use Prelude (available in CS6) to convert AVCHD…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor