April 19, 2010

Premiere with CUDA for compositing

, although known for misdirection, makes an interesting case for using Premiere CS5 as an After Effects replacement, if you have the CUDA card to engage the hardware acceleration of the Mercury engine.

It's an angle not imagined here, but you would have at least AE 2.0 capabilities that would be handy under a deadline:

"Well, it's only Premiere Pro that will really gain anything from using a Mercury approved card. But the performance boost is really insane! (Sometimes 75 times faster, and that means it will be real time). So a lot of the basic compositing you do in AE can now be done in real time in Premiere Pro.

So I will definitely use Premiere Pro much more for compositing and motion graphics, and just throw it over to AE when I have to.
With all the basic stuff in there, like Transforms, Blending modes, CC, Track Mattes, Green Screen (Ultra keyer is amazing) and the most used effects, Premiere Pro is quite capable of doing at least 75 % of the effects stuff I need. In real time. On several HD layers.

And as an added bonus, export to web formats, DVD, Blu-ray etc. will be lightning fast compared to AE. If you don't need all this wonderful real-time, and faster exports, you don't need to bother using Premiere Pro, and you can save your money, not buying the Quadro FX 4800."

2 comments:

evan said...

With the concept of Mercury engine acceleration in PP but not in AE Cs5, I went to import an AE comp into PP as dynamic link then rendered it through AME.
It took longer than when I rendered directly out of AE, and produced some artifacts as well.
So there does not seem atm to be an option of speeding up AE heavily composited stuff.

Rich said...

I wonder exactly what slow it down...