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MillimeterThe Great GPU Shift
Feb 26, 2010 12:00 PM, By Trevor Boyer
Adobe's Mercury playback engine to put GPUs to work.
Adobe's Mercury engine will use GPUs (some Nvidia GPUs for now) to improve playback when editing video.
Adobe has embarked on an unfamiliar path as it prepares for the rollout of its next-generation video-production software suite. "We've never talked about future releases in the same way as we have with [the as yet unnamed successor to CS4]," says Giles Baker, group product manager editing workflow for Adobe. "We wanted to make sure that when we release [the new suite], it's not a surprise to people that it's 64-bit-only." That news emerged in October. Around that time the public learned more about the company's next-gen plans via Adobe Labs' website, which announced the development of Mercury, a new video-playback engine for Premiere.
The Mercury engine is designed to leverage both the 64-bit-ness of all future Premiere Pro platforms and the emergence of powerful GPUs. The idea is to take some of the strain off the computer's CPU and allow the editor to play back more streams and effects in realtime or get more tasks done simultaneously in the background, such as encoding. Adobe's spiel on Mercury playback is that with the right system, an editor can achieve smooth-scrubbing playback with up to nine layers of P2 footage in the timeline with no rendering. Multicam projects with 4K RED clips and color corrections are suddenly a breeze. (Adobe's demo system had a quad-core processor and an Nvidia FX 4800 card.)
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The Mercury engine will require one of a few specific Nvidia cards to work. (Initially qualifying: the Quadro FX 3800, FX 4800, FX 5800, or CX, and the roughly $400 GeForce GTX 285.) Adobe plans to extend support to more GPUs in the future, including Nvidia's next-generation GeForce GF100 cards. That apparent exclusivity is a product of Adobe's view that going forward, a disproportionately large chunk of computers' performance jumps will come from GPU advancements.
According to Adobe, Mercury is not just about taking super-charged systems' playback from great to astounding. Laptop editing becomes a lot more powerful with Mercury playback. Baker says that Premiere's existing option to adjust the playback resolution combined with the new playback enhancements will allow editors on laptops to add complexity to their timelines that they wouldn't have attempted otherwise.
Baker singled out the Apple MacBook Pro as a beneficiary of the Mercury engine. Many Apple notebooks find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to play back even one stream of raw AVCHD MTS files in Premiere Pro and other programs, as this reporter knows well. (I have a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo with the included GeForce 8600M GT, and MTS playback simply does not happen.) Of course, no mobile GPUs are on the current list of supported GPUs, either Mac or PC, so laptop users will have to wait for future developments to employ Mercury playback.
Even with the relatively lower-end GeForce GTX 285 handling the graphics processing, Baker says, Mercury will enable an editor to move about three streams to the GPU. "By moving the processing of those three streams onto the GPU," he says, "you actually free up the CPU to do more."
Adobe CS4 already addresses Canon HDSLR footage natively; now Mercury will enable editors to do more with the QuickTime-wrapped H.264 files. "H.264 is just a hard codec to work with," Baker says. "Even on a MacBook Pro [with Mercury], you can edit DSLR footage with color correction and basic transitions in realtime, with no rendering."
Many editors interested in the as yet unnamed successor to CS4 will blanch at the minimum system requirements for taking full advantage of Mercury playback, but they can't say Adobe didn't warn them. The company has been clear in mapping out a future that will be fueled by 64-bit computing and powerful GPUs.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.