Jumping on the CS5 Bandwagon

egproductions

egproductions

Veteran
So I am about to upgrade my system as well as my NLE to CS5 but have a few questions for those who are more familiar.

Part of my current workflow is to convert my 5D footage to cineform for obvious reasons. Because of the mercury playback engine I am considering not converting to cineform since I should be able to edit without doing a transcode. My only concern is if cs5 handles the 5D II black and white levels properly. Previous versions of premiere seems to clip this detail.

Why is it called mercury playback engine when adobe says on their site that it helps with encoding and rendering also.

The Mercury Playback Engine doesn't just deliver blazing performance and a fluid editing experience. By more optimally using your entire system performance, it also accelerates rendering and encoding, reducing the time required to deliver content to your clients. The only thing we can’t help you decide is what to do with all of the free time you'll now have.

What does this mean? Is it only helping encoding by freeing up system resources? Or does it acutually utilize the graphics card for encoding? If so, does it work in conjunction with your CPU or does it take over the CPU entirely?

What happens when I throw an HD I/O card that does encoding into the mix? Will the card also work in conjunction with the previous 2 or would it have been a waste to purchase such and expensive CPU and graphics card.

Thanks!
 
egproductions said:
So I am about to upgrade my system as well as my NLE to CS5 but have a few questions for those who are more familiar.

Part of my current workflow is to convert my 5D footage to cineform for obvious reasons. Because of the mercury playback engine I am considering not converting to cineform since I should be able to edit without doing a transcode. My only concern is if cs5 handles the 5D II black and white levels properly. Previous versions of premiere seems to clip this detail.

Why is it called mercury playback engine when adobe says on their site that it helps with encoding and rendering also.

The Mercury Playback Engine doesn't just deliver blazing performance and a fluid editing experience. By more optimally using your entire system performance, it also accelerates rendering and encoding, reducing the time required to deliver content to your clients. The only thing we can’t help you decide is what to do with all of the free time you'll now have.

What does this mean? Is it only helping encoding by freeing up system resources? Or does it acutually utilize the graphics card for encoding? If so, does it work in conjunction with your CPU or does it take over the CPU entirely?

What happens when I throw an HD I/O card that does encoding into the mix? Will the card also work in conjunction with the previous 2 or would it have been a waste to purchase such and expensive CPU and graphics card.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

The Mercury playback engine utilizes the graphics card for rendering as well. It is very fast! I am not sure about the black and white levels of the 5D footage. PPro converts footage to 4:4:4 while editing, so I doubt you will see any clipping - I have a 7D and don't notice any, the waveform shows all the levels in the clip.

I would suggest downloading a trial version and see for yourself. :)

Best,

- Hunter
 
Thanks Hunter. I'll have to test some 5D footage out once I build my system (current graphics card and OS doesn't support CS5)

Will my CPU aid in the rendering or does the graphics card totally take over the process?

How much benefit can I expect to see between a quadro 4000, 2000 and 600? I haven't found any benchmarks but if you have experience what would you guesstimate?
 
Indeed! This really helps thanks!

BTW, I purchased a PNY GTX 460 which might actually outperform the quadro 2000 for the purposes of editing in Premiere CS5 for less than half the price.
 
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i've been using CS5 master suite for about 4 months now and i'm really happy with it,its such a headache reliever for me to not have to spend days converting before i can do a single edit of a project.i would really recommend it from my personal experience w/o and then the changes since i've been with it.
 
Here's some benchmarks for you: http://ppbm5.com/

All I will say is don't necessarily believe all that Adobe tells you. I've had a loaded CS5 system for four months, built by an established, experienced HP/Adobe/Matrox dealer. It has brought me lots of headaches with instability issues and less than promised capabilities.
 
Check this out: http://www.studio1productions.com/Ar...remiereCS5.htm

Lotsa questions answered.
Click to expand...

Great link! Thanks for sharing.
jewlzthedirector said:
i've been using CS5 master suite for about 4 months now and i'm really happy with it,its such a headache reliever for me to not have to spend days converting before i can do a single edit of a project.i would really recommend it from my personal experience w/o and then the changes since i've been with it.
Click to expand...

Indeed, I am working on a huge promotional video where we shot 1.5 tb of mp4 footage. CS5 has allowed us to edit the footage nativily without having to transcode. It has paid for itself already with the amount of time saved!
 
I'm still a little confused as to what areas the mercury playback engine helps. I know that it aids in rendering (be it in the timeline or on export). Tightly encoding a file will utilize the GPU more than an uncompressed file format. It also allows GPU enabled effects and transitions to play back without rendering in realtime. What I've read, however, is that it does not support decoding of file formats. So a really tightly compressed h.264 won't actually see any playback benefit with the engine enabled. I have also heard seemingly conflicting posts that it really helps with playback of file formats that would normally need transcoding.
 
The Mercury engine is all over the place to speed things up - utilizing the GPU for some tasks is only one part of it.
So even without a supported card the Mercury engine is at work under the hood, but not as fast.

Frank
 
Well I for one feel like Adobe has fooled me quite a bit. I have a brand new 8 core 2.4 westmere with the I gb ATI 5770 and 8 gigs of memory. Trying to edit panasonics AVCHD without transcoding results in a picture that I can hardly recognize. It is blocky and jump around in the frame and also strobes. So I have to render. The rendering is fairly fast but I have to render OVER and OVER. Everything needs rendering! The cuda card are no longer available except the $1800 quatro (and work wont spring for that much)

I feel like I'm editing back in 2001 with this "wonderful" technology. I am now transcoding every bit of footage to save my sanity, and of course Premiere does not seem to be able to do that within the footage so I have to go use media encoder (which is VERY fast btw) but who wants to go through multiple steps like this? I wish I could just ingest it into Premier, flick some settings switch to have it automatically transcoded, get coffee and get back to my nice simple life.

I have much to learn about Premier, and hope I am missing some important details as I've only used it for three weeks up to now - but up to now it has felt like mostly hype. If I don't transcode - I'm in render hell and I can't see the footage which I'm supposed to now be cutting so efficiently.

How come the Adobe evangelists are having such a wonderful time on three year old powerbooks, as they claim?
 
Stuart ... thanks for the suggestion. It makes ALL the difference in the world and I did not find that before your suggestion had me look and change it. The playback now is acceptable by a large margin. :)
 
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