Premiere Pro and NVidea PureVideo

[Laurence Kingston]

For several days I've been using NVidia PureVideo decoder on my PC with WMP10 to playback M2T files. The difference in performance and quality is just amazing. I get flawless M2T playback with hardly any CPU usage at all. The reason for this is that most of the work of the MPEG 2 decoding is assigned to the graphics processor instead of the CPU. By the way, I'm using the PureVideo decoder with an older ATI graphics card.

With that in mind, I just found this article:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_25705.html

Here is an excerpt:

“NVIDIA continues to provide Adobe users with ever increasing graphics performance, powering a real-time editing and compositing workflow within Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects,” said Steve Saylor, vice president of digital video and audio for Adobe. “NVIDIA professional solutions are the standard for all of our partners’ OpenHD configurations that deliver a line of open, scalable, certified desktop HDV and HD solutions, optimized to meet the needs of video, film, and broadcast professionals, at a fraction of the cost of expensive proprietary systems.

What it looks like to me is that Adobe products like Premier Pro are going to be able to take advantage of the hardware acceleration in many standard graphics cards. This should drop the load on the CPU considerably and make working with native M2T video quite practical even on lessor systems.

I'm pretty sure that decoder such as the NVidea Purevideo will be limited to a single stream of video, and I expect that the CPU will still have to work like crazy during transitions like crossfades, so I don't expect it to be a total miracle, but none-the-less it seems like very good news for Adobe users.

I wouldn't be surprised if Sony isn't already working on this for Vegas 7. After all, it's simply taking advantage of Directshow instead of the aging VFW (video for windows) that we've all been limping along with these past few years.

For many projects with a single stream of video and straight cuts (80% of what I do for instance), this could reduce almost the entire load off the CPU! This is pretty big news IMHO!

[Laurence Kingston]

I'd be curious to know if any Premier Pro users have NVidia Purevideo installed. Maybe the hardware acceleration is already working!

[Gary Bettan]

One of the new features in Premeire Pro 2 is GPU support. The graphics card acceerates rendering and previews:

GPU-accelerated rendering
Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 automatically adjusts to take full advantage of the power of your graphics card, accelerating the preview and rendering of motion, opacity, color, and image distortion effects.

Owners of any oversion of Premeire or Premeire Pro can upgrade to 2.0 for just $199!!

For more info http://www.videoguys.com/adobesingle.html#prempro2

Gary

[Laurence Kingston]

It looks like the M2T preview is accelerated even when applying color correction! I've seen bad reports on how hungry PP can be when previewing native M2T HDV, but it is entirely possible that these people would have had an entirely different experience with a decoder like NVidea PureVideo installed. Has anyone run PP with NVidea Purevideo yet? Does it actually work yet as it is advertised? It sure sounds sweet!

[George Ellis]

Just a caution. If you plan to use PvP and it does work well, I suggest getting another card than any of the 6800 series. The 6800 series' PVP is broken. nVidia's only fix for it was to go back and alter all of their documentation saying that it was fully scalable and available. All the rest of the 6x00 line as well as the 7x00 line are great. I know nVidia has stated that they will provide H.264 acceleration with the 7x00 line, and I 'think' they later said any with PvP (ATI will has only mentioned the X1x00 line with AVIVO so far).

Edit - PVP is PureVideo - sorry.

[Jason Lowe]

So, working with native HD files isn't necessarily the kiss of death that many have said it would be?

[Laurence Kingston]

Originally Posted by George Ellis

Just a caution. If you plan to use PvP and it does work well, I suggest getting another card than any of the 6800 series. The 6800 series' PVP is broken. nVidia's only fix for it was to go back and alter all of their documentation saying that it was fully scalable and available. All the rest of the 6x00 line as well as the 7x00 line are great. I know nVidia has stated that they will provide H.264 acceleration with the 7x00 line, and I 'think' they later said any with PvP (ATI will has only mentioned the X1x00 line with AVIVO so far).

Edit - PVP is PureVideo - sorry.

So, you've run PP alone with PureVideo then? Can you tell us more?

[George Ellis]

Originally Posted by Laurence Kingston

So, you've run PP alone with PureVideo then? Can you tell us more?

No. I keep track of the issues with the various cards. We had a system that we were going to build for high-def displays (a video wall) and were going to use either the 6800 or X800 cards because of WMV acceleration. We settled on the X800, but the project was cancelled during scoping.

[Graham Hickling]

George, You mention the 6X00 series - can I take that to mean that 6600s will benefit similarly from PureVideo?

If so, would you happen to know if 6600s are of any use in providing acceleration within PPro2? The Adobe 'supported hardware' page lists the 6800 but is silent on 6600s.

[Laurence Kingston]

6600s are listed as compatible here:http://www.nvidia.com/page/purevideo_support.html

There's a free 15 day trial here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/dvd_dec...185-trial.html

I wish somebody would try this out and report back. I'm curious as anything about how well this actually works at accelerating native hdv editing preview.

[George Ellis]

Originally Posted by Graham Hickling

George, You mention the 6X00 series - can I take that to mean that 6600s will benefit similarly from PureVideo?

If so, would you happen to know if 6600s are of any use in providing acceleration within PPro2? The Adobe 'supported hardware' page lists the 6800 but is silent on 6600s.

The 6800 may work based on the chart (above). That is updated from the last I saw from nVidia. So now, they only list WMV decode as broken. So, it may be ok for PP2. I would think the 6600's would as they had a working PVP as advertised.

Also, there have been two AGP 7800GS boards announced and they aren't listed as AGP on that list.

[Zack Birlew]

Actually, the 6800 series' Pure Video isn't broken, that is, if you're using the PCI Express versions. It's the AGP 6800GT and 6800 Ultras that had the broken chips but nVidia fixed it before making the PCI Express versions. The 6600s always had working Pure Video chips, AGP and PCI Express, and are what I would recommend for video purposes. However, if you could wait out a bit for the next set of nVidia cards, I'm sure they'll add even more video acceleration. Unfortunately for me, my only option is to get an ATI Radeon X850XT or an AIW version if they made it, but ATI's video doesn't look quite as good as nVidia's (at least on the PC side as far as I know).

So, if you don't have PCI Express, a 6600 is your best bet. If you have PCI Express, then you're all set to pick the card you want.

[Laurence Kingston]

I'm using a vintage ATI card and it works just fine with Purevideo. Of course since it isn't an NVidia card it isn't on the list ;) It accelerates all manner of mpeg including HDV M2T from media player. The difference in the quality and playback efficiency from Windows Media Player 10 is outstanding. This is what has me so interested in Premier Pro and this type of acceleration. If it works as well at accelerating 1080i playback from the PP timeline as it does from WMP it will make native M2T editing quite practical I'm sure.

[George Ellis]

Thanks Jack. I had forgotten that they had fixed it with the PCI version (later chipset).

As for nVidia IQ better than ATI, some would argue ;)

[Zack Birlew]

That is true, George. I mostly based that comment off a recent review of the ATI X1800XT or whatever it's called that recently came out. Maximum PC did a comparison and found the nVidia video performance to be better. However, that's most likely going from a pixel-by-pixel comparison and it may not look any different at all to the Average Joe. But, I haven't seen it in performance myself, so I can't make an accurate final judgement. However, what I do know is that the nVidia video performance I get with my 6800U is very good, except when it comes to HD, then it gets all stuttery and flat out doesn't work.