Splice Now

As some of you may know, Adobe has been working on a new player engine for Premiere that aims at full utilization of all your CPU cores and tight integration with your graphics card. Shown at IBC last year,  information about the technology, code-named “Mercury,” seems limited to a few breathless blog posts and a recently-posted video. But the demo, available here (Sneak Peek: Adobe Mercury Playback Engine) is very impressive. They’re able to show multi-stream native editing of 4K Red footage — with just a high-end Nvidia card on a 64-bit PC. Yes, you read that right — 4K on a stock PC. According to this post, the technology will initially be limited to Nvidia’s “Cuda” architecture.

When Mercury might appear in a product you could buy isn’t clear (Adobe CS5 is slated for delivery in April). What is clear is that the price of high-end video performance is being driven relentlessly downward by the video game market, which in turn is driving the capabilities of modern GPUs (the chip in your graphics card).

A lot of editors are just getting used to the idea of working in HD. That may seem pretty tame a lot sooner than you think.

This entry was posted on February 11, 2010 at 8:37 am and is filed under Adobe Premiere, Workflow. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.