Mercury Playback Engine + CUDA + Premiere

[x2x3x2]

Note: I posted this questiong by mistake under Editing, mods please erase the other thread. Thanks.

Will the Marcury Playback Engine accelerated by CUDA card in Premiere accelerate encoding for all video formats when exporting from Premiere or only certain ones?

[poisondeathray]

Not every format is supported, but the common ones are. There should be a list at the Adobe site

DEcoding is accelerated, so indirectly ENcoding is sped up (this frees up CPU cycles to ENcode) . Also many effects are GPU assisted . Overall you see on average ~1.5-3x speed increase over CS4 when rendering & encoding (depends on many factors) for the same project on the same hardware. Sometimes you can see as much as 10-20x . Editing is much faster, because everything is a lot smoother, and you can natively edit instead of transcoding to a digital intermediate

[x2x3x2]

Ah i see, so if we're talking encoding only (without the supported hardware accelerated effects). There won't be much difference then? Would you say any increase would be worth the price of say the Geforce 470?

[poisondeathray]

It's definitely worth it, and be a big difference with encoding

There's quite a big difference even if you don't use any effects. Especially on CPU intensive HD footage (e.g. AVCHD) . In CS4 and other NLE's , most of the CPU usage is "eaten up" just by playing back/scrubbing the timeline (easily 40-80% depending on your setup) . So instead all that being wasted, it goes to ENcoding. Like I said, on average you get 1.5-3x speed on the encode. (It has to be DEcoded in order to be ENcoded, and the bottleneck is decoding on most NLE's for things like h.264 and AVCHD footage)

You don't need a medium or high end card, even a $100 card will work (you need 768MB memory) - search for the MPE card hack - there are dozens of threads on it on other forums. Higher end cards with more shaders (eg. GTX 480) allow more layers for realtime playback, not necessarily more speed for encoding. The shaders aren't used for encoding (CPU is). You can do 8-9 Layers of AVCHD with GTX480 , but if you had GT240 , maybe only 2-3. Still it's many times faster editing (silky smooth) compared to CS4

e.g.
http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-creative-suite/477968-how-make-premiere-cs5-work-gtx...-200-gpus.html

(there are many more sites, just search)