I first learned to edit video at school, maybe 30 years ago, on reel-to-reel Sony black and white video machines. The process was not as disruptive as, say, editing sound tape with a razor blade (see my years at the BBC about 25 years ago) but one error could ruin many hours of great work with one wrong button press.

Since then we have come a long way, and now video editing is a real-time (nearly), computer-enabled marvel.  What back then only a well-funded company could do with a Quantel Paintbox,  now you and I can do on PCs that, even when you go crazy and over-configure, cost less than $1000.

Ironically, the software can now cost more than that, but that is where the power is.

For many years, off-line editing on PCs was a bust for me. It was expensive and the drivers for the video boards were terrible; I used to joke that the time it took to update the drivers was faster than the time it took me to do an editing job. I did love Adobe Premiere (first really good editing software I used) but I hated the PC experience.

Truth is I went Mac!  

But now, happily, I’m at AMD and have a new AMD Phenom™ II 3Gz Quad-core with Dual ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 cards. That’s one heck of a lot of processing power.  But the issue for me was that, from my Mac days, I know FCP keyboard shortcuts in my sleep: since I went Mac – could I go back?

That question may now be irrelevant thanks to two pieces of software and some nifty enablement courtesy of AMD Fusion.

I will write more on Sony Vegas 9 another day (but I LOVE the new interface and it’s much faster) but today I wanted to talk about Adobe Premiere as part of the latest CS4.

The Next Wave of Video Editing

AMD has just announced a beta plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 that dramatically improves the performance of a range of complex video editing tasks. The plug-in is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Adobe and AMD engineers designed to take advantage of ATI Stream technology in a way that allocates processing between available system CPU and GPU resources for maximum application performance.

The Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 plug-in draws on the computational power of both the CPU and GPU to improve the program’s performance. ATI Stream technology allows the powerful GPU to be used for more than just graphics processing, resulting in improved general computing power.  This is the industry-changing power of accelerated computing ― the power of Fusion.

In the case of the Adobe Premiere plug-in, a lot of the processing is still being handled by the multi-core CPU, but what is nice here is that I finally get to unlock ATI Stream compute acceleration capabilities sitting on those ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards. Great graphics cards are not just for gamers.

It’s hard for me to give exact measures of the improvement at home ― I just don’t have the measurement tools, but our labs (who have those tools) tell me with the latest Catalyst driver you can see  up to 8 times greater encoding performance. ¹

More specifically, for those looking to build DVDs (or in need of MPEG2 streams) the AMD Fast MPEG2 encoder performs over 178% faster than Adobe default encoder.²  I still like H.264 for quality and compression and the AMD Fast H.264 encoder performs up to 668% faster than Adobe default encoder.

I also dipped into the latest version of Adobe Photoshop and there are lots of ATI Stream accelerated features there too – more on that another time.

Editing has been almost real-time for a few years, and now I’m waiting for rendering and compression to catch up.  In a pre-Stream world it took 8 hours to render my China Olympics video which ended up being 50 GB ― now I need to compress that to fit onto a DVD and onto a Blu-ray. The beta plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 is really starting to take huge chunks out of that problem.  

The future really does seem to be about Fusion.

Now if we could just get Blu-ray players to work faster…

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.

¹The Beta plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4 demonstrates significant increases in video encoding performance.  When installed, the plug-in encoded an H.264, 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second, High Quality file in 47.3s; without the plug-in, Adobe Premiere Pro encoded the same file in 372.5s (Custom pre-set based on 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second High Quality where Video Bitrate = CBR 15 Mbps & Audio Bitrate = 128 kbps), demonstrating an almost 8x faster encode time.  The input file size for each comparison was 367 MB.

System Specifications:  AMD Phenom™ II X4 955 3.2GHz processor; 8GB Corsair Dominator CM3X2G1866C9D memory; Sapphire ATI Radeon™ HD4870 1024MB; Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP1.  Performance of the Adobe Premiere Plug-In will vary based on system configuration, ATI Radeon product, source file and output settings used. 

²The Beta plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4 demonstrates significant increases in video encoding performance.  When installed, the plug-in encoded an MPEG2, 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second, High Quality file in 38.8s; without the plug-in, Adobe Premiere Pro encoded the same file in 108s (Custom pre-set based on 1440×1080i 29.97 frames-per-second High Quality where Video Bitrate = CBR 15 Mbps & Audio Bitrate = 192 kbps), demonstrating over 178% faster encode time.