CS5 Production Premium Benchmarks

Executive Summary

This report presents the findings of a market-specific benchmarking project con-ducted by Pfeiffer Consulting for Adobe. The main aim of the research was to document the performance and productivity gains linked to develop-ments introduced with Adobe CS5 Production Premium, compared to the previous release of the software. Specific areas of focus were the impact of the Mercury Playback Engine, 64-bit support in Adobe® After Effects® CS5 and Premiere Pro® CS5, as well as other productivity improvementsAdvanced processing support. Adobe CS5 Production Premium introduces the Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere Pro CS5, as well as 64-bit sup-port, support for CUDA acceleration and improved use of multi-processing, multi-threading and GPU-based processing, resulting in a significant increase in performance and productivity in HD post-production. Productivity gains in benchmarks showed an up to 12x performance increase over older releases.Roto Brush. After Effects CS5 introduces Roto Brush, a tool for automated rotoscoping, providing dramatic productivity gains over previous rotoscop-ing methods. In addition, Premiere Pro CS5 features Ultra Keyer, making working with ad-hoc green-screen footage highly efficient.Efficient support for emerging standards. Support for increasingly popular new forms of video content, such as H.264 files from DSLR cameras, as well as 2K and 4K footage has been significantly improved: Rendering and Exporting DSLR movies was up to 6 times faster than with previous releases of the soft-ware. R3D support has been significantly improved.

Pfeiffer Report • Benchmark Analysis

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Table of Contents

Executive Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

The Mercury Playback Engine . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

HD, 2K and beyond: On the Road to Cinema Resolution . . . . . . . . 6

64-bit Support: After Effects CS5, Premiere Pro CS5 and Photoshop CS5 . . . . . 8

Towards Real Time HD Production: Overcoming Processing Hurdles . . . . . . . . . . 8

Roto Brush and Ultra Keyer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Key Benchmark Results: Average of over 130 Performance Benchmarks

CS4(100%)

CS5(43.20%)

Chart based on the average of over 130 individual performance and workflow benchmarks per software release. Reference value: Average time for Premiere Pro CS4 with 4GB of RAM. Shorter is better.

Key Benchmark Results: Best result (Rotoscoping 5 second clip)

CS4(100%)

CS5(10.07%)

Chart showing the best result of all performance and workflow benchmarks conducted for this project. Reference value: Average time for After Effects CS4 workflow. Shorter is better.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium: New Efficiencies for Today’s Production Realities

Performance boost for high-resolution video and cinema production

Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium Benchmarks 1

Key Benchmark Results: Roto Brush provides a significant performance boost for rotoscoping.

All texts and illustrations © Pfeiffer Consulting 2010. Reproduction prohibited without previous written approval. For further information, please contact [email protected] data presented in this report are evaluations and generic simulations and are communicated for informational purposes only. The information is not intended to provide, nor can it replace specific productivity research and calculations of existing companies or workflow situations. Pfeiffer Consulting declines any responsibility for the use or course of action undertaken on the basis of any information, advice or recommendation con-tained in this report, and can not be held responsible for purchase, equipment and investment or any other decisions and undertakings based on the data provided in this report or any associated document.Adobe, the Adobe logo, After Effects, Photoshop and Premiere Pro are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Mac and Mac OS are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the United States and other countries. Windows is a registered trademark or trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Methodology

This report is based on technology analysis and market-specific performance and productivity benchmarks conducted by Pfeiffer Consulting for Adobe Systems Incorporated.

Performance MeasuresExtensive performance measures analyzed the impact of advanced hardware support introduced in recent releases of Adobe Creative Suite, including support for 64-bit processing, support for GPU-based processing, as well as enhanced support of multi-processing and other hardware-related features.

Productivity MeasuresPfeiffer Consulting conducted extensive, market-specific productivity and efficiency benchmarks of common imaging workflow tasks and sequences.

Hardware and System softwareWindows : Two identical Dell Precision Windows 7 workstations equipped with 2.83GHz quad-core Xeon processors and with 4 to 32 GB of RAM, factory-configured respectively for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.

Mac: 2.83GHz quad-core Mac Pro workstation equipped with 4 to 32 GB of RAM, running Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2.

Nature of productivity benchmarksExperienced professionals performed segment-specific workflow tasks and assignments, defined in clearly repeatable steps and executed in a closely monitored way.

To ensure real-world results, no scripting was used for any benchmarks.

All statements in this report are factual and can be independently verified. For in-depth discussion of the benchmark methodology, system configurations, and comprehensive benchmark description and results, please download the complete “Adobe CS5 Production Premium Benchmark Report” at www.pfeifferreport.com.

About Pfeiffer ConsultingPfeiffer Consulting’s mission is to provide unique high-level, international market intelligence and strategic consulting for both content and technology providers.

Pfeiffer Consulting is the publisher of the Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies, an online resource on trends in the technology and content industry, as well as numerous specialized studies and reports. For more information, please visit: www.pfeifferconsulting.com.

Premiere Pro CS5 Benchmarks (XDCAM)Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

0 50 100 150 200 250 300

0 50 100 150 200 250 300

Sharpen andTint effects:

Complex

Sharpen andTint effects:

Simple

Premiere Pro CS5(Windows)

Premiere Pro CS5CUDA (Windows)


24 sec.

1 min. 36 sec.

2 min. 38 sec.

36 sec.

2 min. 57 sec.

4 min. 36 sec.

Rotoscoping Workflow: Roto Brush vs. After Effects CS4 Rotoscoping

0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000

0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000

Extractslowly moving figure

from background(5-second clip)

4 min. 2 sec.

47 min. 23 sec.

After Effects CS5(Mac Pro)


Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

Premiere Pro CS5 Benchmarks (R3D, 4K, 2:1, 24fps)

0 50 100 150 200 250

0 50 100 150 200 250


Export 20 secondsof 4k footage

with zoomand 2 keyframes

to 1080p

Premiere Pro CS5(Mac Pro)

Premiere Pro CS5CUDA (Mac Pro)


1 min. 56 sec.

3 min. 33 sec.

2 min. 22 sec.

Key Benchmark Results: Mercury Playback Engine and CUDA support provide a significant performance increase in benchmarks of common workflow operations

Key Benchmark Results: Managing cinema-resolution footage has been made significantly more productive in the new release of Premiere Pro CS5.


Major Points

t Adobe CS5 Production Premium introduces the Mercury Playback Engine, a set of technologies that can significantly increase productivity in high-definition production workflows.

t The Mercury Playback Engine combines 64-bit support, with extended use of CPU and GPU based computing resources, as well as support for CUDA enabled parallel processing.

t Processing of H.264 video from popular DSLR cameras was over five times faster with Premiere Pro CS5 than with the previous release.

t 64-bit support allows After Effects CS5 to work with extended memory configurations, and significantly increases the number of frames of a composition that can be previewed from memory.

0 100 200 300 400 500 600

0 100 200 300 400 500 600

4 video streams withmultiple effects

2 video streams withcolour correctionand brightness &

contrast

Premiere Pro Performance: Export 1080p P2 Sequence (30 sec.)Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.




1 min. 13 sec.

2 min. 59 sec.

5 min. 18 sec.

3 min. 50 sec.

9 min. 34 sec.

72.85 178.59 378.35

81.74 230.00 574.17

1 min. 22 sec.

The painful reality of hardware bottlenecks: Video and film production are areas where hardware performance remains crucial in order to create an efficient production pipeline. That is also the reason why on the higher end of the spec-trum, dedicated hardware solutions for non-linear editing and effects production are still widely used. PC and Mac-based video production, on the other hand, still has well-known bottlenecks that imply time-consuming importing, render-ing, and exporting during many phases of the workflow, and can make post-production work frustrating at times. This is increasingly problematic as use of high-definition video (1080p, 2K and 4K) have all but replaced the mainstream SD workflows, and are raising the bar in terms of efficiency requirements for production environments.What Adobe CS5 Production Premium brings to the market: The latest release of Adobe’s suite of video tools brings a new approach to the production landscape, with a set of technologies dubbed “Mercury Playback Engine” that harnesses as much of the available processing power of modern PC and Mac workstations to reduce bottle-necks in editing, playback, rendering and effects production.64-bit support, multi-processing and CUDA: The key components of the Mercury Playback Engine are 64-bit support, improved use of available CPU power through multi-threading and multi-processing, and improved use of the processing power on video cards, including support for CUDA on compatible graphics cards, as well as software optimization in Premiere Pro CS5. Accelerated effects: In Production Premium CS5, many common effects and editing operations such as color grading are using hardware acceleration, and do not slow the editing process down as they did in the past. Support for 64-bit systems also significantly improves RAM preview performance in After Effects.

The Mercury Playback Engine

Using software and hardware to increase productivity in high definition production workflows


Adobe Creative Suite 5 Production Premium Benchmarks

Benchmark Analysis and Key Results

Support of advanced software and hardware acceleration through the Mercury Playback Engine introduced in Adobe CS5 Production Premium can speed up production workflows significantly. This chart shows the results from a benchmark measuring the time necessary to export a 30 second 1080p sequence. Premiere Pro CS5 is between two and three times faster than Premiere Pro CS4 in these tests; with CUDA support, Premiere Pro CS5 was up to almost eight times as fast as the previous release in this benchmark.

t The DSLR revolution: DSLR cameras producing HD footage have become game changers in the new high definition video market, by combining the capacity to shoot 720p and 1080p clips using the exceptional optical quality of lenses conceived for high-quality still photography.

Using H.264 footage from a popular DSLR camera shows how the Mercury Playback Engine improves overall efficiency: Exporting a 1 minute composition with several clips from Premiere Pro CS5 using Adobe Media Encoder took a fraction of the time necessary with the previous release.

t Keeping up with market evolutions: High definition production formats are in constant evolution, and efficiently handling emerging new standards is essential. This means keeping up with the processing requirements from superior quality high-definition formats that are also heavily compressed, such as AVC-Intra, introduced by Panasonic.

Increasingly short turnaround times mean that native support for AVC-Intra and the possibility to efficiently export edited footage can be crucial. While Premiere Pro CS4 added AVC-Intra support with the 4.2 release, Premiere Pro CS5, using the Mercury Playback Engine, was almost three times as fast as the previous release completing this benchmark — even without the help of CUDA acceleration.

t Memory counts: After Effects CS5 and Premiere Pro CS5 are the first releases of these programs that natively support 64-bit systems, giving users access to all the memory available on high-performance systems.

This has an immediate impact on the number of frames that After Effects can preview from memory: After Effects CS4 was limited to 4GB of memory, and could preview 24 frames (less than 1 second) of a complex composition in our tests. On the same computer, equipped with 32GB of RAM, After Effects CS5 could preview twenty times as many frames.

Mercury

Mercury

0 200 400 600 800 1000

0 200 400 600 800 1000

3 video streams

2 video streams

Premiere Pro Performance: Export 1080p H.264 Sequence (1 Min., No Effects)Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.



1 min. 51 sec.

7 min. 25 sec.

2 min. 36 sec.

14 min. 15 sec.

0 50 100 150 200 250 300

0 50 100 150 200 250 300

4 video streams

2 video streams

Premiere Pro Performance: Export 1080p AVC-Intra Sequence (15 sec., No Effects)Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

54 sec.

58 sec.

2 min. 3 sec.

1 min. 13 sec.

1 min. 30 sec.

4 min. 19 sec.

Mercury

Mercury




54.00 57.81 123.48

73.76 90.55 259.18

Mercury

24 frames

0 100 200 300 400 500

0 100 200 300 400 500

Maximumnumber of frames

that can be previewedfrom memory

After Effects: RAM Preview of Complex CompositionsNumber of frames. Longer is better.

After Effects CS5(Mac Pro, 32GB)


480 frames

Support for Emerging File Formats: AVC-Intra

After Effects CS 5: Impact of 64-bit Support

Emerging Trends: DSLR Video and H.264 Editing


Major Points

t The Mercury Playback Engine, hardware acceleration and performance improvements introduced with the Adobe- CS5 Production Premium, provides a very significant and in some cases spectacular increase in performance and efficiency.

t Adobe CS5 Production Premium handles H.264 footage from popular video-enabled DSLR cameras significantly faster than the previous release of Production Premium, offering an over 5x performance increase in some benchmarks.

t Cinema resolution 4K footage from cameras such as the RED can be used without processing and played back in real time, even after common editing operations.

Premiere Pro Performance: Export 1080p XDCAM SequenceTime-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350

0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350

4 video streams withcolor correction

1 min. 28 sec.

4 min. 26 sec.

5 min. 36 sec.




No turning back: High definition video is increasingly ubiquitous. Of course, HD camcorders have been around for years, but the changes and challenges that are emerging now go well beyond what used to be known as HD. Beyond 1080p, 2K and 4K footage with high dynamic range push the envelope in terms of qual-ity. In order to achieve best results, many areas of video-production are moving to the new formats, even in the case of on-line distribution, where actual output resolution is still frequently quite a bit lower than true HD video.Multiple revolutions: In fact, several HD revolutions are under way in parallel, often competing with each other, and creating additional challenges by opening completely new areas of creativity. On the high end of the spectrum, digital film cameras such as the highly regarded RED system are in the process of revolu-tionizing film production; in addition, the RED camera with its 4K resolution and high dynamic range is increasingly used in advertising and contributes to a completely new set of challenges for production workflows used to standard 1080p resolution. Without forgetting the huge impact video capable DSLR cameras are having on low-budget film and video production, and creating a completely new style of video content with a very distinctive look — and its own set of production issues. And this is just the beginning...Confronting the new challenges: How does Adobe CS5 Production Premium handle the performance and efficiency challenges of the new production reali-ties? For this project, we have benchmarked common production workflow oper-ations in a wide variety of HD formats, ranging from widely used XDCAM and P2 files to more recent additions such H.264 from DSLRs and R3D. It is clear from these benchmarks that the processing acceleration and performance improvements introduced with the latest release provide a very significant (and in some cases spectacular) increase in performance and efficiency.

HD, 2K and Beyond: Tackling the Future of Video Production

How Adobe CS5 Production Premium handles the challenges of high definition production workflows




Sony’s XDCAM format is one of the most widely used formats in professional video production. As with all HD formats, exporting video after editing is one of the main bottlenecks in a production workflow.The Mercury Playback Engine introduced with Adobe CS5 Production Premium provides a significant performance boost in this process; support for CUDA acceleration, which uses the processors on compatible video cards, increases performance further.

t The DSLR revolution: DSLR cameras producing HD footage have become game changers in the new high definition video market, by combining the capacity to shoot 720p and 1080p clips using the exceptional optical quality of lenses conceived for high-quality still photography.

The performance boost Premiere Pro CS5 and the Mercury Playback Engine provide for these processing-heavy workflows is impressive: Even without the help of CUDA acceleration, Premiere Pro CS5 was almost three times faster than the previous release in these benchmarks.

t The Very High Resolution Challenge: The popular RED camera shoots at 4K resolution, using a proprietary compressed raw video format called R3D that delivers cinema-quality resolution and dynamic range. Working with these files without a dedicated hardware solution can be frustrating: files need to be pre-processed to be usable in popular non-linear editing programs; even simple editing operations such as zooming into a scene require lengthy rendering.

Unlike competing editing solutions, Premiere Pro CS5 not only uses R3D footage directly (as well as many other tapeless file formats), playback is real-time, and exporting footage is almost two times faster than with the previous release, making production with RED footage a significantly more fluid process.

t Facing production challenges: Premiere Pro CS5 introduces a new tool for color keying called Ultra Keyer. It allows the creation of high quality color keys even with poorly lit green-screen footage, a situation where Keylight performs less well.

Apart from the quality of the result, Ultra Keyer is also much faster than keying techniques in previous releases of Premiere Pro: For these benchmarks, we wanted to see how Ultra Keyer would handle 1080p P2 footage. Premiere Pro CS5 managed to complete the benchmark in just over 40 seconds, a fraction of the of the time required by Premiere Pro CS4 using Color Key, with vastly superior results.

HD and beyond

HD and beyond

0 100 200 300 400 500

0 100 200 300 400 500

3 video streams withmultiple effects

2 video streams withcolour cortrectionand brightness &

contrast

Premiere Pro Performance: Export 1080p H.264 Sequence (30 sec.)Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

2 min. 51 sec.

5 min. 43 sec.

2 min. 56 sec.

7 min. 39 sec.

1 min. 25 sec.

1 min. 16 sec.




0 50 100 150 200 250

0 50 100 150 200 250

Premiere Pro CS5 Benchmarks: Chroma Keying (P2 Footage)Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

41 sec.

3 min. 22 sec.

Do not re-use HD and beyond

HD and beyond

Export 30 second1080p P2 clip

with Ultra Keyer (CS5)and Color Key (CS4)

31 sec.




42.77 168.23113.24 553.02

Do not re-use

HD and beyond

0 50 100 150 200 250

0 50 100 150 200 250

Premiere Pro CS5 Benchmarks (R3D, 4K, 2:1, 24fps) Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

1 min. 56 sec.

3 min. 33 sec.

Export 20 secondsof 4K footage


to 1080p

2 min. 22 sec.




Working with 4K Footage: The RED Challenge

Common Processing Techniques: Ultra Keyer

The New Wave of HD: DSLR Video


Major Points

t 64-bit support allows applications to access all available memory, and can provide a very significant performance boost for applications such as Photoshop CS5 and After Effects CS5.

t In benchmarks for this project, After Effects CS5 managed to preview 20 times as many frames of a complex composition as the previous release.

t In certain workflow benchmarks, Photoshop CS5 was 3 to 4 times faster than the previous release.

t After Effects and Premiere Pro CS5 incorporate many under-the-hood processing improvements that significantly increase processing speed in many common operations.

t Transcoding a complex composition in After Effects CS5 was over two times faster than with the previous release.

t Premiere Pro CS5 and After Effects CS5 do not support 32-bit systems any longer. (Photoshop CS5 exists in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.)

After Effects: RAM Preview of Complex CompositionsNumber of frames. Longer is better.

0 100 200 300 400 500

0 100 200 300 400 500

Maximumnumber of frames

that can be previewedfrom memory

480 frames

24 frames



Let there be memory: Adobe Photoshop CS5, Premiere Pro CS5 and After Effects CS5 now offer native support for 64-bit systems, both on the Mac and on Windows. This effectively means that these programs now can access memory beyond the inherent limitation of 32-bit systems. While this may not be as big a deal for a word-processor or a spread-sheet, data-intensive applications such as Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro can receive a very significant perfor-mance boost from extended memory.About the benchmarks: For the Adobe CS5 Benchmark project Pfeiffer Consulting conducted extensive performance and productivity measures to doc-ument the impact of 64-bit support on programs such as Photoshop and After Effects. Benchmarks were conducted both on Mac and Windows platforms, with a large variety of different files and workflow scenarios. In the case of Photoshop CS5, we also compared performance with a variety of memory con-figurations. For more information on these benchmarks, please refer to Adobe Photoshop CS5: 64-bit Performance and Efficiency Measures. Key results — After Effects CS5: With 4GB of memory, After Effects can only preview a few seconds at best of a complex composition; adding memory allows a much larger segment of composition to be previewed. In addition, archi-tectural changes in After Effects CS5 result in improved overall performance.Key Results — Photoshop CS5: 64-bit support in Photoshop CS5 can provide very significant productivity gains over previous releases with lower memory configurations. In some tests, the latest release was up to 15 times faster process-ing large image files than without 64-bit support. Opening and saving large files such as are used in digital matte painting was up to six times faster than on 32-bit Systems; generally, 64-bit support makes Photoshop operation more fluid and more efficient, particularly when working with large and complex files.

The Impact of 64-bit Support on After Effects CS5 and Photoshop CS5

The impact of extended memory on effects production and digital imaging




The most immediately visible and useful effect of extended memory on After Effects productivity lies in the number of frames that can be previewed from memory. While in our example, a complex After Effect project, the previous release of the programme could barely preview one second from memory, After Effects CS5 managed to display twenty times as many frames on a Mac Pro with 32GB of memory.

t Making better use of hardware resources: In addition to 64-bit support, After Effects CS5 incorporates many under-the-hood improvements to better exploit available hardware resources such as multi-threading and multiple processors.

The results of these improvements are clearly visible in the benchmark results: After Effects CS5 took less than half as long to render a complex project than the previous release.

Given the importance of these operations in the typical effects workflow, overall productivity gains with After Effects CS5 are likely to add up considerably.

t Comparing memory configurations: Adding memory to a computer is usually a very cost-effective way of increasing performance.

In the benchmarks conducted for this project we compared how different memory configurations affected performance of Photoshop CS5 with a variety of different files. The results are revealing. Particularly when working with very large files, adding memory has a profound impact on efficiency: Doubling the base configuration of 4GB allows Photoshop to process a 2GB image in just over a minute compared to 3 minutes previously. Doubling the memory again cuts the necessary time to just over 37 seconds.

In addition, ample memory will also improve the performance of several applications running in parallel.

t 64-bit support speeds up imaging workflows: The benchmarks conducted for this project analyzed the speed of typical workflow scenarios, consisting of opening a file, applying several editing operations and saving the document.

These benchmarks clearly document productivity gains linked to 64-bit support: Executing the workflow scenario with Photoshop CS4 on a 4GB Mac Pro workstation took almost three minutes for a 750MB file; with Photoshop CS5, running on the same Mac Pro equipped with 16GB of RAM, the same set of tasks could be completed in less than a third of the time. In the case of a 1.5GB image, there is almost a 4x difference between the two configurations.

64 bit

64 bit

0 30 60 90 120 150

0 30 60 90 120 150

Transcodecomplex composition

(5 seconds,default settings)

After Effects: Transcoding of Complex Composition Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

1 min. 10 sec.

2 min. 28 sec.



0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800

0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800

Photoshop Workflow Benchmarks — Flat Image FilesTime-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

56 sec.

2 min. 57 sec.

3 min. 38 sec.

10 min. 13 sec.

42.77 168.23113.24 553.02

TotalPhotoshop

Workflow1.5GB Image

TotalPhotoshop

Workflow750MB Image

Photoshop CS5(Mac Pro, 16GB)


0 50 100 150 200

0 50 100 150 200

64 bit

Photoshop Performance — 2GB ImageTime-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

37 sec.

38 sec.

58 sec.

2 min. 45 sec.





37.09 37.59 58.31 164.94

Resample image(bicubic)

Thanks for the Memory: How Photoshop Performance Scales with Available RAM

Productivity Gains of 64-bit Support: Photoshop CS5 Workflow Benchmarks

Improved Processing Speed: How After Effects CS5 Stacks Up


Major Points

t Through 64-bit support, the Mercury Playback Engine and CUDA support, Adobe CS5 Production Premium provides significant acceleration for many time-consuming post-production tasks.

t Productivity of Premiere Pro CS5 in handling HD, 2K and 4K workflows is significantly increased over previous releases of the software.

t In benchmarks for this project, CUDA acceleration provided up to 12x acceleration in common workflow tasks over previous versions of the software.

Premiere Pro CS5 Benchmarks: The Impact of CUDA (XDCAM footage)Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

0 50 100 150 200 250 300

0 50 100 150 200 250 300




24 sec.

1 min. 36 sec.

2 min. 38 sec.

36 sec.

2 min. 57 sec.

4 min. 36 sec.

Render compositionwith Sharpen and

Tint effects (Simple)

Render compositionwith Sharpen and

Tint effects (Complex)

The painful production reality: In very few market areas is the difference between what is possible and what can be achieved quickly as painfully visible as in HD video post-production. Unless one is using a dedicated (and very costly) hardware solution for non-linear editing, video post-production remains clogged down by a series of punishing hardware bottlenecks that seem to be getting worse rather than better, since tapeless HD, 2K and 4K footage have taken over as dominating production formats.A long list of speed bumps: There are serious processing issues all along the post-production pipeline. Some software requires you to pre-process native file formats, which can be extremely time-consuming; and even when the non-linear editing application supports use of native camera file formats such as XDCAM, H.264 movies from DSLR cameras or R3D footage from the RED camera, working with these files can be slow-going, since many of the modern file for-mats are compressed and require additional processing power to work with them.What Adobe CS5 Production Premium contributes: The latest release of Adobe’s video production suite confronts these processing challenges with an approach that combines software performance improvements with hardware acceleration. Apart from the native support for 64-bit systems, Adobe’s latest set of tools includes the Mercury Playback Engine that uses a variety of resources to increase processing and preview performance, accelerate effects display, and boost output speed.CUDA support: Premiere Pro CS5 is among the first major applications to make broad use of the CUDA architecture developed by NVIDIA, bringing the par-allel processing resources of compatible video cards to generic computing tasks. As the benchmarks for this project show, CUDA acceleration has considerable potential to speed up processing-heavy production tasks.

Moving Towards Real Time: Overcoming Processing Hurdles

The Adobe CS5 approach for dealing with computing challenges in HD production workflows.




Adobe CS5 Production Premium accelerates processing tasks of the HD post-production workflow significantly: exporting a sequence with Sharpen and Tint effects applied took almost twice as long with the previous release than with Premiere Pro CS5.Using CUDA acceleration in the same workflow benchmark reduced the necessary processing time to a fraction of the previously necessary time.

t Getting ready for the future: 2K and 4K workflows are increasingly popular, even when the final output format is not digital high definition projection or 35mm film, but standard 1080p resolution footage: with additional input resolution, the editing process is much more flexible, offering panning, zooming and cropping within the boundaries the high definition footage without losing definition in the final output.

In this process however, the limitations of PC and Mac-based editing solutions are quickly apparent, requiring time-consuming pre-processing and rendering. Even with Premiere Pro CS4, which can work with native 4K footage from the RED camera, exporting to 1080p footage was very slow in our tests; Premiere Pro CS5 could complete the same tasks in a fraction of the necessary time, even without the help of CUDA acceleration.

t Welcome to the DSLR revolution: HD-capable DSLR cameras are in the process of redefining creative video and film production, but they bring their own challenges. The H.264 encoding format popular on such cameras uses a compression scheme developed primarily for playback. This means that working with these files directly in an editing program either requires ingesting files, or putting up with a slowdown in operation.

Premiere Pro CS5, is significantly faster processing DSLR footage than the previous release, as these benchmarks show. CUDA acceleration provides an additional boost in performance.

t When every second counts: Professional post-production workflows are usually under intense deadline pressure, and waiting for compositions to render can be nerve-wracking.

CUDA acceleration can bring a significant boost to the professional production pipeline, since it can speed up common, accelerated effects in Premiere Pro CS5 considerably.

This chart on the left shows the cumulated processing times for a typical workflow example. Premiere Pro CS5 is clearly faster in this example, but it is CUDA acceleration that eliminates some render times completely, dramatically increasing productivity.

0 300 600 900 1200 1500

0 300 600 900 1200 1500

Premiere Pro CS5 Benchmarks: 4K Performance (R3D, 4K, 2:1, 24fps) Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

3 min. 42 sec.

23 min. 17 sec.

222.29 286.91 1397.00

Export 20 secondsof 4K footage


to 1080p




4 min. 47 sec.

0 30 60 90 120 150

0 30 60 90 120 150

Premiere Pro: Workflow Benchmark (XDCAM Footage)Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

21 sec.

2 min.

2 min. 25 sec.




Workflow total(Import footage,

render effectsand transitions,

export sequence)

Real Time

Real Time

0 100 200 300 400 500 600

0 100 200 300 400 500 600

Premiere Pro Workflow Benchmark: Export Work Area (30 sec., H.264)Time-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

1 min. 31 sec.

3 min. 11 sec.

9 min. 3 sec.




4 video streams,multiple effects and

color corrections

HD Production with DSLR Footage: A New Set of Challenges

CUDA in HD Post-Production: XDCAM Benchmarks

Working With 4K Footage: Managing the Throughput


Major Points

t Roto Brush is dramatically more efficient than common rotoscoping techniques, both compared to manual rotoscoping using earlier versions of After Effects, or compared with frame-by-frame rotoscoping using Photoshop.

t Roto Brush automates a particularly time-consuming task of the modern post-production workflow. In benchmarks for this project, Roto Brush was up to 11 times faster than traditional rotoscoping techniques, and produced a cleaner result..

t Roto Brush has the potential to redefine video production workflows in terms of cost and efficiency, and can bring rotoscoping to a much wider audience.

Rotoscoping Workflow: Roto Brush vs. After Effects CS4 Rotoscoping

0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000

0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000

4 min. 2 sec.

47 min. 23 sec.

CS5(Mac Pro)

CS4(Mac Pro)




Rethinking the basics: Rotoscoping is a well-established, yet tedious part of many post-production workflows, that can add hours if not days to a production schedule. There is nothing very magical about rotoscoping: it consists in extract-ing an element from its background, either because it is part of pre-existing foot-age, or filmed in a situation that does not allow green-screening. A car or plane in full motion are good examples.

There are two common methods for rotoscoping, either using After Effects, or with the help of Photoshop. The After Effects method relies on the combined use of motion tracking and masking to create a highly precise mask that follows a moving object from frame to frame, a process that can take many hours for a detailed object in full motion. An alternative is to export a clip to Photoshop, and to create masks using the selection tools, individually for every frame in the sequence, then re-importing the images into the video editing program. Both methods are tedious and time-consuming in the best of circumstances: in our relatively simplistic benchmark example, which consisted in extracting a slowly moving person from a background of a 5-second clip, it took close to an hour to complete.Roto Brush to the rescue: To solve these problems, After Effects CS5 adds a highly efficient new feature to the toolbox: the Roto Brush. In a nutshell, Roto Brush automatically creates a mask from a selection, and then recalculates its position for every successive frame in a sequence, reducing a tedious manual process into a few minutes of processing. (Manual adjustments are still possible). Roto Brush not only produces automatic results of impressive quality, it also cre-ates a mask that has been color-decontaminated, and removes the jittery effect that can easily occur when rotoscoping on a frame-by-frame basis. Needless to say, productivity gains of Roto Brush over manual methods are dramatic.

Roto Brush: Reinventing Rotoscoping

After Effects CS5 streamlines a very time-consuming compositing technique.




Using previous releases of After Effects, rotoscoping involved manually creating a path to extract an element from its background, followed by manual adjustments of this path to fit the movement in the clip at regular key-frames, and then to use motion tracking to interpolate the position of the path between key-frames.In our (admittedly simple) rotoscoping benchmark based on extracting a slowly moving figure from its background, Roto Brush was 11 times faster than the manual process. In more complex examples, time savings are likely to be even more dramatic.In addition, Roto Brush opens up rotoscoping to After Effects users who would not have the time or the skills for the manual process.

t Redefining rotoscoping: Roto Brush, introduced with After Effects CS5, manages to replace an enormous amount of tedious manual adjustments in After Effects or frame-by-frame mask generation in Photoshop by an automated process that takes a few minutes instead of hours.

t Getting started: Working with Roto Brush starts out with selecting the unwanted background area in the first frame of a clip, using selection tools similar to the Quick Select tool in Photoshop.

t Editable masks and Color Decontamination: Roto Brush not only generates an editable mask to extract an element from its background and adjusts it all along a clip, it also deals with several unwanted side effects of rotoscoping. Color decontamination removes an unwanted color cast so that the extracted element blends naturally into any background; interpolation algorithms make sure that the rotoscoped sequence remains fluid at playback — “edge chatter”, a jittery playback, is a frequent unwanted side-effect of traditional rotoscoping.

t Traditional Rotoscoping is time-consuming: Whether one uses After Effects to extract an element from the background of a clip, (see chart on previous page) or Photoshop to create masks on a frame-by-frame basis, the process is very long and labor-intensive.

This chart compares the time necessary to extract a slowly moving person from a background, using selection tools in Photoshop to create masks for all frames of a 5-second clip, compared with Roto Brush in After Effects CS5.

It is important to point out that not only was Roto Brush dramatically faster than using Photoshop, the results with our clip were also clearly superior with After Effects CS5.

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Rotoscoping Workflow: Roto Brush vs. Frame-by-Frame Rotoscoping with PhotoshopTime-scale in seconds. Shorter is better.

42 min. 34 sec.


After Effects/Photoshop CS4(Mac Pro)

4 min. 2 sec.



Roto Brush: Compared with Frame-by-Frame Rotoscoping with Photoshop

Extracting the Essential: Roto Brush


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