Mercury Playback Engine on Premiere CS5 tested on GT240

[pacifact]

Adobe Premiere Pro is able to use GPU (graphic card) to accelerate real time video editing. This is a very cost saving solution for may freelancing videographers who are working on hard-to-edit H264 encoding footage, such as footage from Panasonic HWC41EU, Sony NX5 and 5D MK II.

H264 is not a editing friendly encoding, one might need a Octo Core Mac Pro to do real time single layer editing. With the help of GPU, normal Core 2 system is able to get the work done.

I just bought a second hand GT240 for $100 tonight. I have hacked it to work with Premiere Pro CS5 for GPU acceleration since only GTX285 and recent Quadro cards are supported by adobe officially.

The result is absolutely stunning, 4 layers of AVCHD footage are able to play in real time picture in picture.

4 Layers, CPU 100%
3 Layers, CPU 50-70%
2 Layers, CPU 30-40%
1 Layer, CPU 25%

System
Windows 7 64 Ultimate
Premiere Pro CS5
Core 2 Quad 9450
4GB DDR II 800

[The Miracle]

Sounds good.

Is the mercury playback engine some software add-on?

What abt the speed comparison of rendering a 1-layer AVCHD between a system with GPU acceleration and one without?

[pacifact]

Sounds good.

Is the mercury playback engine some software add-on?

What abt the speed comparison of rendering a 1-layer AVCHD between a system with GPU acceleration and one without?

it's a native function of CS4/CS5, rendering speed is 2X-3X faster on GT240 which has only 96 stream processors. I believe it's much faster on GTX480, which has 480 stream processors.

[Willopher]

What about the velocity relative to the delivery of AV CHD-1 layer between a system with GPU acceleration and one without...

[pacifact]

What about the velocity relative to the delivery of AV CHD-1 layer between a system with GPU acceleration and one without...

basically, depends on how much GPU accelerated effect you used. for a normal AVCHD track without any effect, the performance gain will be like 3-4X with mercury engine turned on. However, you must use graphic card with DDR5 graphical ram instead of DD3 (DD3 is up to 40% slower). The maximum performance gain is 13X according to Nvidia website.

Premiere Pro CS5.5 is coming, Adobe claimed that MPE will work better on the new version