Greater performance gains with the Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5

[Adobe TV - tvadobe.com] The 64-bit Mercury playback engine in Premiere Pro allows you to do incredible things with HD content. Even mixed media, different frame rates, different frame sizes, different formats can all live natively inside a single sequence, and with the power of Mercury and GPU, you can play these back in real time. You can add effects in real time, and you can do more than ever in real time in Premiere Pro CS 5.5. So, in this sequence that we have here, you can see that we have six basic layers of HD. And if I simply right-click here, and go into our Reveal In Project, this will first show you that our first piece of content is 960 x 540. If I go to the next one here, take a look at this, we can see that this one is 1920 x 1080 at 23976. And then another clip here, which is at a different frame size--1280 x 720. So right away, three different frame sizes and at different frame rates all existing together. And if I simply start playback on this sequence, and I hit the tilde key to go fullscreen--again, one of the capabilities of Mercury is that playback never stops--you can see that brilliantly, beautifully, it all plays wonderfully in real time, all six layers. But actually, as we dive down deeper you can see that Video 1 is actually labeled composite. This is a nested sequence. So if we double-click on that, that brings open another sequence which actually now showcases three additional layers of HD. If I select the first one, what you can see is that we actually have our ultra keyer applied here. So we've got some real-time keying happening as well as some real-time eight-point garbage matte. And if I show you what's happening here, you can see that the matte is actually animated over time. So we've got real-time keying, real-time garbage matte happening, and, again, additional layers of HD content. All of that's playing in that first sequence together. But as we look at Video 1 again, we can again see that we have yet another nested sequence, which houses three more layers of HD content at different frame sizes, different frame rates and also with effects like the fast color corrector and the four-point garbage matte. So what we really have are ten layers of HD with real-time effects, all playing brilliantly, all playing fullscreen, and playback never stops. Now, how are we doing this? Well, the Mercury playback engine actually has two methods. It has a software method, which doesn't leverage any GPU, but it also can leverage the GPU on supported NVIDIA cards. And I'm happy to tell you that in 5.5 we've added support for more than a dozen new NVIDIA cards including cards on laptops. Yes. So now not only can you take advantage of the 64-bit power of Mercury by itself, you can also use it in conjunction with an NVIDIA card to get even better playback performance, faster render times, and typically do everything in a render-free environment. One other element of this is that we've also accelerated additional effects inside Premiere Pro CS5.5. So things like directional blur, fast blur, and a our new film dissolve effect-- all of these are GPU-accelerated, which means that you're just going to get incredible performance on this content the moment you drop it on. Again, we can play this back. Let's go fullscreen. Here's our dissolve. Brilliant. Beautiful. Simple. Easy. Also new in Premiere Pro CS5.5 and yet another thing that's taking advantage of the advanced Mercury playback engine is the new RED R3D source settings panel. You can see that it's been slightly reskinned. We've given you access to curves, and we allow you work natively with RMD files, and you can either reload or save to new RMD files directly from this source settings panel. These RMD files contain nondestructive color information which can also been added and manipulated inside REDCINE-X. So anything that you've done in REDCINE-X can also be leveraged here. All the information is nondestructive. You can apply it directly to your clips. You can see that we can even reload from an RMD or go back to the default look of this. Again, we've got complete control over the curves, just like this. We can draw our own. We can create presets, and then when we're done we can click OK, bringing us back into Premiere Pro, and because this is just Metadata, because it's very much like Camera Raw, it doesn't put any additional strain on the CPU. You can continue to play this footage--2K, 3K, 4K--seamlessly, brilliantly, and very easily. We also allow you to reload color information from RMD files. You can reload or you can even save to RMD. RMD stands for Red MetaData, and this contains all of the color information, all of the settings that you see here in a sidecar file. This same RMD can also be leveraged in REDCINE-X. So whatever you're creating in REDCINE-X can be leveraged here. You can apply it. You can see that we can reload from the RMD. We can draw our own curves so we can go back to the default view, click OK. The RMD information is applied to the clip, but of course it's all nondestructive. And because it's just Metadata, it doesn't put any additional strain on the CPU during playback or decoding. The Mercury playback engine has changed the way we work. It's changed the way we edit. And now you can truly experience the full 64-bit power with mixed media living in a timeline whether you're working on a desktop system or a laptop system. [Adobe TV - tvadobe.com]