4.2 update coming...

[Eric Addison]

Hey kids - just read this and thought I'd pass it along...good news indeed.

http://provideocoalition.com/index.php/adobe/story/matrox_and_other_3rd_party_i_o_vendors_with_cs4/

AVC-I native support...it's finally here. And after I just bought an EX3....

[dradeke]

Yes, correct.  I doubt we'll see Simon come over to this forum.  However, you can ask me.  I'm working on a post for the blog later tonight (hopefully) and willing to take some questions.  However, please don't be terribly upset if I can't be completely forthcoming. Some stuff cannot be said and I don't want people to become frustrated because I can't be entirely plain.  If you're cool with that, we're good!

I appreciate your understanding in advance.  Let the prognosticating and questions begin!

Dennis

[RDA972]

I almost forgot about the 4.2 update so excited was I to read Simon's post.

So the burning question is, what is the state of play?

P.S. "I doubt we'll see Simon come over to this forum"

I can't see why he shouldn't. This place is warm and cosy and friendly. It's not the dragon's den it used to be. So please ask Simon to come on over and enlighten us all. I, for one, would be most appreciative.

Don't we love to hear from the horse's mouth?

[PaulieDC]

If you're cool with that, we're good!

Works for me! And since you know this stuff, no sense in hunting Simon down. Plus I just looked and saw that the 285's are roughly $400. That's a lot of P,B&J in brown bags for the next few months. I might even skip buying the bags and just wrap it in a page from the Asbury Park Press.

(do they still even print that??)

[dradeke]

Okay - last post of the night...really need to do some other work!

Paulie - I see 285's out there for much closer to $300 than $400.

Paulie - I have used both ATI and nvidia cards for many years.  They're both pretty good, but I've mostly used nvidia for two reasons - my high-end customers use them and they just plain work.  I've rarely had ANY issues with nvidia or their drivers.  They're EXCELLENT cards and I wholeheartedly recommend them

Simon - Show off!  He and I are seemingly tied at the hip at times.

OpenCL - not much more to add than to say that yes, we love ATI and AMD just as much as nvidia and Intel.  The ink's still drying on OpenCL, but it shows promise.  In the meantime, we'll be making video with CUDA.

Performance - I'll tell you that in my personal opinion, this is a total GAME changer.

Cost of buying a new card - is a short term problem at worst.  GPU cards have continued to double in performance and half in price far better than CPU's have.  A year from now, nvidia's next GPU cards will be bargain basement prices - and today's cards are truly killer in performance.

Cheers,

Dennis

[Guest]

Hi All,

Ah you'd be surprised where I hang out ---- but yes, normally I don't dip into the threads too much ..... that whole only 24 hours in a day thing keeps getting in the way.

As Dennis says --- for the current nVidia cards, 285 looks like the only one we'll get to ---- remember this is in the labs right now, so "in the future" a lot of you will have already replaced your current cards and systems with newer, sexier things .... hence why Fermi or later GPU support is going to be important.

I saw a comment about ATI and OpenCL ...... we know those guys well, and since I'm ex-SGI I know a lot of the folk at both nVidia and ATI personally from our shared past lives.

Exciting, market moving code takes a long time to write and test (unfortunately), particularly since we all like NLEs that are stable as well as fast. OpenCL wasn't ready and CUDA was ready when we started on this in 2007 / 2008. We couldn't wait for ATI and OpenCL to catch up with us.

Next steps for us are to get Mercury market ready and into shipping products ---- trying to switch to OpenCL would add ATI support, but mean that we'd all be waiting even longer to get a super exciting Premiere Pro. Our decision is to get the smooth as butter experience of Mercury to market as soon as possible.

Then we'll have to come back and look at what it would take to re-implement that into OpenCL for a release after that, noting that many our customer base will have invested in nVidia GPUs between that first release and any OpenCL enabled release and weigh up the work required to do that against other features we could implement with those same engineers (and that's a long list too ;-).

Since we can't go back to 2007 and put OpenCL into the market, I'd be curious to know, given that we're talking mostly about customers having to buy new cards for this fabulous future --- would you as users be willing sacrifice other cool future features in order to get the ability to choose between ATI and nVidia ?

Know though that we're good friends with ATI / AMD too and continue to chat to them about OpenCL and where it can play in DVA and Adobe creative tools in general --- cross platform and open choice are definitely good things.

Later .....

Simon

[Eric Addison]

As someone who has nVidia cards, I say get this to market as soon as it's ready. I'll upgrade to whatever card gives me that kind of performance.

I'm hoping you all have this ready for CS5, but if not then I'm already looking forward to CS6.

[Jeff Bellune]

would you as users be willing sacrifice other cool future features in order to get the ability to choose between ATI and nVidia ?

No.  Since I have to buy a new card anyway to take advantage of this feature (my 1-year old GTX280 isn't going to cut it), I don't care who makes the card as long the GPU acceleration works.

-Jeff

[RDA972]

Thanks for showing up in person, Simon, and clarifying things for Jim.

"would you as users be willing sacrifice other cool future features in order to get the ability to choose between ATI and nVidia ?"

No way! I am all for forging ahead with nVidia.

P.S. I am already lusting after a Quadro FX 4800/5800 graphics card.

Hang the expense!

[Jim_Simon]

I'd be curious to know, given that we're talking mostly about customers having to buy new cards for this fabulous future --- would you as users be willing sacrifice other cool future features in order to get the ability to choose between ATI and nVidia ?

That depends on the "cool feature".  If it's a fully native 64 bit version of Premiere, then no.  If it's something lame like transcribing text from speech, or support for esoteric, consumer or other non standard video formats (including 5D types), hell yes!

In fact, I think a 64 bit Premiere is the only thing I'd not give up for full ATI accelleration.  I understand if OpenCL didn't make it time to switch for the next big release. But after that, then yes definitely switch!  CUDA will (or at least should) become obsolete, now that we have a platform independent API for GPGPU processing.

[Eric Addison]

JSS1138 wrote:

  If it's something lame like transcribing text from speech, or support for esoteric, consumer or other non standard video formats (including 5D types), hell yes!

I don't think that speech to text is lame...I think it's a feature that's not yet mature. I really believe that if Adobe can refine this technology, and make it far more accurate, they'll have something great. Couple that with OnLocation and Story...you got a toolset filmmakers, and the rest of us, can use.

As for support for the 5D and the likes - PPro needs have to have it. I know more and more people that are using them to shoot video. I wouldn't take one out on a shoot for a big client (maybe for b-roll shots), but I know there are a lot of professional people shooting with them...much like RED, if Adobe can provide native support that works as well as everything else, they will be ahead of the curve. I don't need support for consumer HDD cameras and the like, but I don't consider the 5D a consumer camera.

I looks like Adobe is on the verge of putting out a Premiere Pro that will really change things and make FCP and Avid users take notice...I hope this comes sooner (in CS5) rather then later (CS6).

So....about that 4.2 update (being that it's what this thread was started about)...anyone else hoping it drops this week?

[RDA972]

"about that 4.2 update (being that it's what this thread was started about)...anyone else hoping it drops this week?"

I sure am.

[dan_aka_jack]

My 2 cents on the GPGPU discussion:

IMHO, GPGPU accelleration of PPro's playback engine is without doubt the most exciting PPro feature I've heard for a very long time.  The idea of being able to grade HD / RAW footage and play it back without rendering is simply awesome.  Well done Adobe!  I completely agree with your strategy of bringing CUDA-based GPGPU accelleration to PPro ASAP and then re-coding the engine to work with OpenCL.  I don't mind being tied to a particular GPU manufacturer for the time being (not least because, as I understand it, nVidia's Fermi GPUs are better suited for GPGPU tasks that ATI's latest generation of GPUs.  But I'm not an engineer so I could be wrong!)  But I do think that OpenCL sounds like it's the future - not least because soon Intel will join the GPGPU fun (i.e. Intel's Larabee CPU/GPU hybrid processor).

Will the GPU only be used during preview playback from the timeline or will it also be used during encoding in Adobe Media Encoder?  It would be lovely if the horsepower of the GPU could be leveraged for both preview and rendering.

I'd also urge Adobe to work closely with Cineform on this... I assume that Adobe's new GPU-accellerated playback engine will require Cineform to commit significant engineering resources to re-write their Cineform engine to work with Adobe's new playback engine.

[tclark513]

I'd also urge Adobe to work closely with Cineform on this... I assume that Adobe's new GPU-accellerated playback engine will require Cineform to commit significant engineering resources to re-write their Cineform engine to work with Adobe's new playback engine.

You won't even need Cineform anymore when this tech gets released.

[PaulieDC]

This is only relevant to the 5D Mark II, but I just read on Planet5D.com that ZoomBrowser (Canon's bundled software with the camera) converts 5D2 files to... AVIs. And that chap said he can edit them in Premiere easily. I'm going to try this tonight, but it would be very ironic if a 5D2 solution was sitting in the camera box all this time that I've been using NeoScene. I mean, who uses bundled software that comes with a camera??? I don't even break the seal!

[dradeke]

PaulieDC wrote:

This is only relevant to the 5D Mark II, but I just read on Planet5D.com that ZoomBrowser (Canon's bundled software with the camera) converts 5D2 files to... AVIs. And that chap said he can edit them in Premiere easily. I'm going to try this tonight, but it would be very ironic if a 5D2 solution was sitting in the camera box all this time that I've been using NeoScene. I mean, who uses bundled software that comes with a camera??? I don't even break the seal!

Why wouldn't you use the Adobe Media Encoder to convert them in the background.  I've done some tests on this with 5D footage to convert to P2 and it looks and works great.

[dan_aka_jack]

tclark513 wrote:

You won't even need Cineform anymore when this tech gets released.

Cineform is far more than just an re-write of the PPro playback engine.  Cineform also offers an excellent video file format which you can treat as essentially lossless.

[dradeke]

brown bag to 285

[Jim_Simon]

The GPU acceleration in the lab is nVidia CUDA, so ATI GPUs don't show benefits

Given that OpenCL has been finalized for over a year, and cards supporting it actually came out from ATI first, that's just not right.

[Guest]

The GPU acceleration in the lab is nVidia CUDA, so ATI GPUs don't show benefits

Given that OpenCL has been finalized for over a year, and cards supporting it actually came out from ATI first, that's just not right.    

Hey Jim,

Sorry to disagree with you, but while the spec was put out by Chronos last December, the SDK which is what we'd need to develop a real product was released to developers in August 2009 for Mac as part of Snow Leopard and for nVidia and PCs in September.

We could obviously have gotten access a little earlier, but it gives you a sense of the timeline and how far off where we needed an option we could develop and test against.

The CUDA stuff we needed was in place much earlier, and nVidia have also been very good about making changes to the CUDA libraries that we need with OpenCL we would have needed it to be very well baked because being an open standard it can't change fast if we hit a brick wall.

[PaulieDC]

Hey, if OpenCL was dragging its feet to get an SDK to the development team, there's nothing that can be done. Early bird catches the Triple Beef Burrito with Nuclear Chipotle topping.

OK, not to start an argument (I'm really not), but if a video card upgrade is in order anyway to leverage GPU acceleration, what's the dedication to ATI? I struggled with two ATI cards in the past and the drivers drove me nuts. There's nothing wrong with nVidia cards (that should start a discussion! lol!), is there, if we get GPU boost? BTW, the drivers I get from EVGA with this GTX260 have been 100% FLAWLESS with Windows 7 (64-bit) for the last 3 months while I've been on it, not one glitch or auto-recover. Come to think of it, Premiere & Photoshop & AME have been flawless too, and I've been on the real 7 for over two months. So anyway, if the drivers are good and the card works, why not switch to nVidia??

Sincerely,

Curious in Cincinnati

[tclark513]

However, you can ask me.  I'm working on a post for the blog later tonight (hopefully) and willing to take some questions.  However, please don't be terribly upset if I can't be completely forthcoming. Some stuff cannot be said and I don't want people to become frustrated because I can't be entirely plain.  If you're cool with that, we're good!

I appreciate your understanding in advance.  Let the prognosticating and questions begin!

Dennis

Hi Dennis,

Can you tell us about the fixes in 4.2?

Thanks!

[tclark513]

Should be soon...

[dradeke]

We ran into a couple of minor snags but it seems like it's all coming together.  So, stay tuned...

Dennis

[Colin_Brougham]

dradeke wrote:

We ran into a couple of minor snags but it seems like it's all coming together.  So, stay tuned...

Dennis

Yes, please. Run into all the minor (and, preferably, major) snags so that we don't have to

Thank you for the update, Dennis... we're all waiting like kids on Christmas.

[PaulieDC]

Yep! Sittin' here like Johnny Bench, glove up...

(thought that was appropriate coming from Cincinnati... )