It’s not really news anymore that Adobe CS5 Premiere makes good use of NVidia CUDA for acceleration, but you may be surprised that it’s good enough to convince a show like Tikibot to switch from Final Cut to Premiere for their work in Salt.
“We’re primarily a PC based shop, with a pipeline designed for budget-minded productions,” said Jackson. “We had been using Final Cut, but when Adobe released CS5 with NVIDIA CUDA GPU acceleration of Premiere Pro we got really interested in moving to Premiere. Faster playback is important for VFX editing as we are constantly updating new versions to the edit and shifting timelines.”
In addition to just accelerating Premiere Pro, it accelerated their inhouse tool ‘Studiopass’ to enable 1080p rendering for reviews.
via Tikibot’s CUDA-Charged Adobe CS5 Premiere Pro Pipeline Boosts “S.
But that’s wacky. Color correction and blending? There’s no need to use CUDA for those, and if you see a huge speed improvement, that probably points to the CPU implementations being bad.
It sounds like a press release written by someone not involved in the project at all.
@ Chad For editing, you’re right. But this press release was more related to the type of multi-layered effects that require some significant computation to get right (Color correction, blending, alignment, grain, etc) that benefited from the use of CUDA-accelerated algorithms in Premiere Pro.
Eh, not really. You can get a LOT more processing power in a PC than a Mac these days, especially the CUDA is involved.
But still, this is a “huh?” kinda press release. Switching from FCP to PP for one project isn’t hard at all. There’s hardly any pipeline change involved. And what’s so great about CUDA in this context? The #1 thing that affects the performance of an editing system is I/O, there’s hardly any computation needed. Faster playback? Faster than what? Watching a movie at 10x speed doesn’t help you edit.
Switching from Final Cut to PP? Is this news if you have both PC and OS systems already at your disposal? So you’ll switch back when Apple finally deigns to release FCP 8. As far as SALT is concerned, no amount of post-production wizardry can save a mediocre film from itself. The enlivening motor in SALT is Angelina Jolie, and nobody can animate her except Angelina Jolie.