To those who doubt the Mercury Playback Engine

evanbutson

evanbutson

Active member
OK so on my main edit suite (not used for Beta testing of CS5) I just installed Master Collection as well as the shiny new drivers for my BlackMagic MultiBridge that now support CS5. I have a GTX 285 installed on a rather aging Core 2 Duo 3 gig with 4 gig of RAM. So basically a dinosaur of a computer. Popped some 720p Canon 7D footage in a timeline and re-interpreted it to 25p for some slow mo goodness. Pressed Play and wammo nice 720p monitoring out of the BlackMagic via HDMI to my ref monitor. Then applied a Gaussian blur and set it to 60. Pressed play, no render, no delay, no downscaling. That is the Mercury Playback Engine with a supported GPU. So for basically the cost of a good meal for 4 people I have got full rez RT playback of dozens of effects from a machine that was built originally to handle a Matrox RTx100 for DV footage!

So then feeling a little brave I also added a luma curve filter, still full speed playback no delays or renders. Then I added a basic 3D stil all good, only when I added a further effect a vertical flip did it start to chug!

So what can I say, for those people out there who say, I get great playback in Final Cut Pro or CS4 or (insert name of editing package) I suggest you try three or four filters on a old machine and see how they stack up :)
 
When you played from the timeline without rendering, do you think what you saw on your monitor was the same as what would have been put out after the render ?

Lots of folks are wonder if image accuracy is sacrificed for speeds, in this case.

What about exporting to a different format? Does CUDA or ME do the same amazing thing?
 
WpgCameraMan said:
When you played from the timeline without rendering, do you think what you saw on your monitor was the same as what would have been put out after the render ?

Lots of folks are wonder if image accuracy is sacrificed for speeds, in this case.

What about exporting to a different format? Does CUDA or ME do the same amazing thing?
Click to expand...

What I am seeing on the ref monitor through the Decklink is a match for what I am seeing on the computer screen (I do have my ref monitor calibrated as much as possible for a consumer screen) as for on export, the rendered result is the same (accounting for changing to a different format, down rezzing to 720p for Vimeo etc. I did a test where I used the BlackMagic timeline without Mercury turned on and couldn't see any difference.

As for helping rendering, no Mercury doesn't help there, but a Quaddro CS will help with H.264.
 
evanbutson said:
As for helping rendering, no Mercury doesn't help there, but a Quaddro CS will help with H.264.
Click to expand...
With effect/s on the video i see huge improvements in rendering times and get better downscaling as well with GPU Acceleration enabled. Try it to export to MPEG-DVD or use Dynamic Link to Encore. I see huge improvements when i export to any format since the GPU processes the effects placed on clips. :)

A couple of days ago i exported a 720p50 Timeline to MPEG2-DVD and it took 96 seconds. The length of the Timeline is 400 seconds long and all clips have Three Way CC on them. I dont get those lightning fast render times from the same Timeline with GPU Acceleration disabled. :)

/Roger
 
Hmmm, I was under the impression that Mercury didnt accelerate render, wil have to do some tests, would be awesome if it did :)
 
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