Mercury playback engine benefits?

[Derkoi]

So I'm currently using Premiere CS5 with a Nvidia 9800GT 512mb card.

I'm thinking of getting a card that will allow me to use the Mercury Playback engine, however I don't intend (at the moment) to edit native 550D footage as I have Cineform Neoscene & I'm not 100% convinced editing natively is a good choice.

Are there any other benefits to the Mercury playback engine or should I not bother since I'm not going to edit native files?

 

[berylium]

I just got the GTX 460 (2 gigs memory) for the Mercury engine. The timelines are now all yellow and there are no problems playing 3 to 4 stacked tracks with effects.

Still, scrubbing is not as smooth as I like. At first I thought it might be the bottleneck from the drives. But scrubbing with intermediary footage (neoscene etc) has no jerkiness.

Other than that I'm pretty happy. Programs using Cuda are blazingly fast: Media show Expresso transcodes 20 times faster. Photoshop benefits immediately .... I"m handling pictures over one gig with ease (ok... my card is 2 gigs video memory).

If you work with 3D editing software then you will see a benefit as a number of renderers are now using gpu power to render for an improvement of 20 times.

But honestly, if none of the above interests you, and you don't mind using intermediary footage, I'd just wait.

 

[Gabrobot]

So I'm currently using Premiere CS5 with a Nvidia 9800GT 512mb card.

I'm thinking of getting a card that will allow me to use the Mercury Playback engine, however I don't intend (at the moment) to edit native 550D footage as I have Cineform Neoscene & I'm not 100% convinced editing natively is a good choice.

Are there any other benefits to the Mercury playback engine or should I not bother since I'm not going to edit native files?

Decoding is actually always done on the CPU AFAIK...the GPU acceleration is for video effects, so if you do any key work or color correction in premiere, you'll be able to play it back instantly without rendering. I've seen it in action, it's pretty awesome.

 

[cam123]

Hey guys,

What is the effect on memory? I just upgraded mine from 3GB DDR3 to 15GB DDR3.
If there is benefit in memory then I'll max it to 24GB DDR3.

Thinking about getting a good video card also. Looking at GTX 470.

Any idea to improve my hardware more?

PC: Core i7 920 @ 4.2 GHZ, SSD Intel Gen2

 

[Ted Ramasola]

So I'm currently using Premiere CS5 with a Nvidia 9800GT 512mb card.

I'm thinking of getting a card that will allow me to use the Mercury Playback engine, however I don't intend (at the moment) to edit native 550D footage as I have Cineform Neoscene & I'm not 100% convinced editing natively is a good choice.

Are there any other benefits to the Mercury playback engine or should I not bother since I'm not going to edit native files?

try the hack on your card, I think you can activate the mercury playback on that, just a hunch. so at least you get a taste of it albeit on a smaller gpu memory. I remembered I got the hack to run on my 9800 but with 1gig ram.

 

[Bane]

try the hack on your card, I think you can activate the mercury playback on that, just a hunch. so at least you get a taste of it albeit on a smaller gpu memory. I remembered I got the hack to run on my 9800 but with 1gig ram.

Can the hack be run on a MacBookPro, I can't find any info on how it's done on OSX...???