There seems to be no limit as to what might be possible with the OpenCL™ pipeline between AMD processors and key Adobe® Creative Cloud™ products. It was only one year ago, at NAB 2013, when AMD first revealed OpenCL-enabled acceleration on Windows for Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine and its implementation in Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC. This powerful combination gave users a taste of what massive compute power and fantastic professional video software could do together to enhance both speed and productivity. Since then, Adobe and AMD have collaborated to deliver dozens and dozens of optimizations that help speed everyday workflows and offer never-before seen features (check out this post if you need to get caught up). These incredible optimized features are available on both AMD-powered Windows and Apple systems, including the awesome new dual AMD FirePro™ graphics-based Apple Mac Pro systems.
Now NAB 2014 is here and the AMD-Adobe relationship continues to deliver a flood of amazing new features. You can read a summary of the highlight here or come by the AMD booth (SL10405—be sure to say hi). We are super excited to introduce our new AMD FirePro™ W9100 cards - perfect for demanding video workflows - check out what Al Mooney, Senior Product Manager, Professional Video Editing at Adobe as to say:
We will showing lots of great demos including a SuperMicro SuperWorkstation (see below) - in fact, have been very pleased with the initial testing of Adobe Media Encoder CC on this system and are seeing great scaling across up to 4 - AMD FirePro™ W9100 cards.
(System Config): 2 x Intel E5-2680 @ 2.70GHz, 32GB RAM Kingston DDR3-1600 CL9, Win7-64bit, 250gb Primary SSD OCZ Vertex 4, 750GB Secondary SSD Samsung 840EVO, AMD Driver 13.35
I’m going to walk you through some real world examples of what AMD App Acceleration via the open standard OpenCL API brings to the latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro CC and the entire video workflow in Adobe Creative Cloud.
New AMD-powered enhancements in Adobe Premiere Pro CC
The new OpenCL-accelerated feathering masks tool adds subtlety and finesse when you apply masks to alter, cover, highlight or obscure a specific section of video content over time. The feathering means you can blend the edges of the mask so that it has a more polished, professional appearance. You can use feathered masks with the new mask tracking feature. This lets you create animated masks in Premiere Pro CC that automatically track an object from frame to frame. You also have the option to Dynamic Link to Adobe After Effects™ CC for more advanced tracking tools. So, for example, after using the feathered mask feature to obscure the identity of a witness, that mask can then automatically track the movement of that face from frame to frame as the person moves through a scene.
How much time have you spent applying color changes to clips? With Master Clip effects, you can name one clip in your bin to serve as your “master clip.” When you apply one or more AMD-accelerated effects to that clip, the look will than ripple throughout your sequence and update all other instances of that clip. It will save you time and preserve your patience!
AMD acceleration also enables powerful, efficient workflows with some of the most popular high resolution cameras and formats. For example, now AMD graphics technology powers the import and playback of native RED camera formats thanks to OpenCL accelerated debayering for the R3D codec. This means that users can directly edit, add effects to and playback RED media files in real-time within Adobe Premiere Pro CC and without conversion, giving them the full benefit of the image quality RED cameras offer. When your project is complete, the render to your final destination format can even be supercharged by using single or dual AMD GPUs for amazing speed. In fact, we are seeing up to 11X better performance made possible from the new optimizations for AMD GPUs.*
The new release of Adobe Premiere Pro CC also expands the previously announced support for Blackmagic formats to include the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera compressed, lossless JPEG format. This is great news for anyone who uses this format in their workflow since there is no low resolution proxy option for working directly with it. Now Premiere Pro CC on an AMD-powered system can take advantage of OpenCL accelerated debayering to provide smooth playback with edits and effects. The CinemaDNG workflow has also been expanded to provide hardware-accelerated debayering for Convergent Design Odyssey 7Q monitor/recorder products.
Of course, just supporting the formats isn’t enough. Premiere Pro CC now features real-time settings and properties for both CinemaDNG and RED R3D media formats, giving you the control you need to get the look just right.
Adobe Premiere Pro CC also adds support for ARRI AMIRA camera’s 3D lookup tables (LUTs) in the ProRes format. With AMD hardware acceleration powering the Lumetri Deep Color Engine, editors can playback the entire palette of AMIRA identified color looks in real-time once the footage is brought into Premiere Pro.
More Flexibility for After Effects CC and SpeedGrade CC
The latest enhancements extend beyond Premiere Pro CC, the hub of the Adobe Creative Cloud video workflow. Thanks to Adobe’s new Mercury Transmit support, you can add a second reference broadcast monitor for full screen previews of your compositions as you work in After Effects™ CC.
Adobe also continues to add flexibility and capability to the SpeedGrade™ CC workflow we announced at IBC 2013. We previously discussed how users on systems with AMD processors can open and enhance Adobe Premiere Pro CC projects, including all of their OpenCL-accelerated effects, directly within SpeedGrade and without the need to first render the Premiere Pro project. Adobe has now added the abilities to turn the Lumetri™ effects on and off, as well to hide or show tracks within SpeedGrade for an easier overview of complex timelines. It even supports the Master Clip workflow described above to simultaneously apply looks to multiple clips.
The pace of development on Adobe Creative Cloud CC features that use OpenCL to harness the performance of AMD APUs, Radeon™ graphics and FirePro professional graphics products is breathtaking. Keep an eye here for more in depth looks and highlights.
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Clarice Simmons is a Senior Marketing Manager at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.
*AMD tests are performed on optimized AMD reference systems. PC manufacturers may vary their configuration yielding different results. Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC test project used several effects (Motion, Opacity, ProcAmp, Gaussian Blur, Fast CC, 3Way CC, Warp Stablizer, B&W, Ultra Key, Noise, Basic 3D, Crop, Composite) with Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC pre-release build, source media: R3D video file, 174 seconds, 5120x270, 23.976 fps, Progressive; render to: MPEG, 1920x1013, 23.976 fps, Progressive, Quality 50. With a desktop PC configured with an AMD FX-8350 processor, AMD FirePro™ W9100 Professional Graphics card, 16GB DDR3-1866, video driver 13.350.1012.0, Window 7 Professional (x64) the export took 4281 seconds with OpenCL™ off, 346 seconds with OpenCL on. FP-92
