New NVIDIA GPUs Speed Adobe CS5.5 Production Premium

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium now runs on NVIDIA GPUs using NVIDIA Fermi architecture, providing real-time video-editing and effects-processing capabilities for the professional market.

Newly certified professional NVIDIA GPUs range from the flagship Quadro 6000 for the most powerful desktop workstations to the Quadro 2000M for mobile workstations. The Apple Mac Pro is also supported with the Quadro 4000 for Mac.

At the NAB Show this week, Adobe (Booth SL3320) is demonstrating Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 software accelerated with NVIDIA Quadro 4000 and Quadro 5000 pro graphics on workstations, which greatly expands the real-time video editing and effect-processing capabilities of Adobe’s non-linear editor. In the NVIDIA booth (SL2728), Adobe is showcasing Premiere Pro on an HP EliteBook 8740w mobile workstation, leveraging the power of the NVIDIA Quadro 5000M, for video editors on the go. The combination of Adobe and NVIDIA technology delivers real-time previewing and editing of native, high-resolution footage, providing fast performance and fluid, real-time video editing for both 2D and 3D content.

With Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and an NVIDIA Quadro graphics solution, users can experience up to 8x faster performance than on a CPU. This provides the ability to apply and refine multiple color corrections and effects in resolutions up to 4K, with smooth scrubbing and playback — all in real time. File encoding is up to 13x faster, significantly reducing wait times.

Quadro GPUs speed computational performance. At the heart of Premiere Pro CS5.5 is the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, based on the NVIDIA CUDA parallel-processing architecture. Additional features are accelerated by the GPU, such as mixing footage for different sources or making other modifications, including directional and fast blur effects, film dissolve transitions, and accelerated media preparation for mismatched media.

Said Bill Roberts, director of video and audio product management for Adobe, “With CS5.5, we are dramatically expanding the range of NVIDIA graphics cards that are supported by the Mercury Playback Engine from 11 to 19, thereby empowering an even greater number of video professionals to be as creative as their imaginations will let them be.”

Featuring 6 GB of graphics memory, the NVIDIA Quadro 6000 is suited to complex video-editing projects, such as ultra-high-resolution 4K RED raw video streams and RED decoding using RED Rocket. Users can decode and debayer 4K R3D and play full-quality 2K video scaled from 4K footage in real time with RED Rocket and Quadro solutions.

True stereoscopic-3D production is also supported, using NVIDIA 3D Vision or 3D Vision Pro and the Cineform Neo3D plug-in.