Technology Sneek Peek: Adobe® Mercury Playback Engine

[dradeke]

Hi guys,

Been working on this blog post for what seems like forever.  I hope you enjoy it.  Please be sure to post comments there and not here...or at least if appropriate post in both places. 😉

http://blogs.adobe.com/genesisproject/2009/11/technology_sneek_peek_adobe_me.html#more

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Dennis

[shooternz]

What an exciting prospect.

Bring it on...SOON PLEASE.

[the_wine_snob]

Dennis,

Thank you for this. I might just hold off on my new workstation for a bit more, to see what comes of this, and to also help me decide on the GPU. I've been using an older Quadro FX4500 for some years, and it's been fine. Until now, I was thinking about going with a newer one, but now might upgrade that choice, if there is going to be a good reason. Obviously, Quadros are not something that one picks up for 6 mos., until something newer comes out.

You've gotten me to thinking, and thanks for that.

Hunt

[Eric Addison]

I'm really hoping this is part of CS5 - it's very exciting technology. My only question - what will my FCP editor friends use now as the excuse on why they still think FCP is better...

[excited_Genie16B8]

Wrong choices will always find a way to be justified.

[shooternz]

You will be fine Jim.  Stick with Tape based DV and your ATI Graphics Card.  Why would you need anything else?

Panansonic , Adobe...Apple...whoever...Jim can do it better it seems ( Hire him as a consultant in how not to do it)

[excited_Genie16B8]

Panansonic , Adobe...Apple...whoever...Jim can do it better it seems

Finally...someone gets me! 

[shooternz]

Nice response.

[medeamajic]

That Mercury is awesome! I can not wait for PP CS5. Please post more info about the Mercury technology.

[dradeke]

My request is that you spread the word folks about the blog entry and tell others.  If you have a voice in the creative community, please use it to get the info out there.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful thankful Thanksgiving!

[Bill Gehrke]

Dennis, this is great news.  Are you by any chance also running CS4 on your HP XW9400? If so I would sure like to see the PPBM4 results from this 12-core AMD system.  We are severely lacking AMD representation on the benchmarks results page.

I am guessing that I may have to start all over with my hardware benchmarking when CS5 is released.  Right now it can test CPU and disk system performance, but not GPU, because currently Premiere is almost completely insensitive to GPU performance

[Chuck_A__McIntyre]

Excellent article and great news Dennis.

Reading between the lines, you didn't state "Mercury" will only be available when CS5 is released.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

[dradeke]

Hello everybody.

Just a thought that if you happen to post something about this somewhere, it would be great for me to know.  If you could post a link, that would be great.

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I know I have a lot to be thankful for. 😉

Dennis

[Eric Addison]

Dennis - I posted something about it on my blog: http://100acrefilmstechcorner.blogspot.com/

[the_wine_snob]

Dennis,

Here's the LINK from the PrE forum.

Hunt

[the_wine_snob]

Dennis,

I have done just that. I posted your link in the PrE forum. I know that you are talking about PrPro here, and pointed that out. Still, many of the attributes of Mercury are talked about in the PrE forum. I see two possibilities: PrE users upgrade to PrPro, when Mercury is included, or they wait for the "trickle down" of some of the features to PrE. Still, some should be salivating over there too. They soon might have a method to resolve their issues and requests - either buy up, or be patient!

Again, thanks for sharing. Now, I have to just learn patience regarding my upgrade path, and my workstation acquisition. Since my taxes are going up so quickly, it might be moot - it'll now take me much longer, before I could buy the new workstation...

Hunt

[dradeke]

Hi guys,

Dave Helmly has done a video demonstrating the Mercury Playback Engine in action - you definitely want to watch this.

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/davtechtable/sneak-peek-at-the-new-adobe-mercury-playback-engine-technolog...

[Chuck_A__McIntyre]

Can I put it on my credit card? I didn't see the buy now button.

[Harm_Millaard]

Dennis,

That is very interesting. Can you ask David to do the PPBM benchmark twice, once with MPE enabled and once with it turned off. That may be interesting, especially with all the cores used.

[dradeke]

Sure Harm.  Can you post the link for convenience sake?

[Harm_Millaard]

http://ppbm4.com

This was of course designed for CS4, so there is no guarantee that it will work with an alpha of CS5 but if you never shoot, you will always miss.

[shooternz]

Outstanding development. I cant wait to get my hands on it.

[Harm_Millaard]

It sure looks phenomonal. That is why I requested the PPBM benchmark, so we can get a feel for what tangible results await us in terms of performance. Even if I lose first place on the results till now (38.0 s which will be included when Bill returns home) that will be fantastic. Can you imagine if the results were to show something like 20 seconds, we would all be standing in line for the new 64 bit version and new graphics cards and even Jim might be willing to change from ATI to nVidia eventually.

[shooternz]

Is it likely to have render speed implications?

[Harm_Millaard]

Dennis is much better qualified than I am, but from the looks of it, yes. In the PPBM benchmark I would expect the most noticeable difference to be in the MPEG2DVD test and to a lesser extent in the Rendering test. The AVI test will not be influenced to a noticeable degree I think. But with these two tests having such a high impact on the total score, my guess is that we could see sizable differences in results.

Based on what I saw in David's presentation, I would not be surprised to see scores like 1.5 - 12.0 - 10.0  bringing the total to 23.5 s or even less. Beware, this is based on my guesstimate derived from my own scores, with a rather irregular disk setup, of 1.4 - 24.6 - 12 and a total of 38.0 s. But you can see from my predictions that I expect the CPU/GPU intensive test to show a major improvement, if the Adobe claims are correct. I would definitely like to see the results from David. The alternative is the conclusion that either I am lousy at predicting anything or I'm an optimist with regard to Adobe.

Let's just hope I'm not an unfounded optimist and ...  well, fill it in yourself.