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[Maximizing CS5.5 Performance With Intelligence Xeon Processors] Hi there. Today we're going to talk about the performance that you can get from Production Premium CS5.5 when you're working with a high-end workstation using Intel Xeon Processors. [Karl Soule - Adobe Systems] Today, we're working with an HP Z800 workstation that has twin Intel Xeon 5660 Processors and what this brings to the table is the performance and speed to pretty much do whatever I need to do when it comes to production work, whether it's working with different formats in the timeline, going back and forth between different applications, even working with extremely high-end format such as R3D (RED) 4K footage and being able to edit that natively, the RED, Raw, R3D files directly in the timeline. So to get started here, I'm working with a timeline that actually has a number of different layers associated with it and I'm going to go ahead and expand this out and one of things that you'll see with this particular timeline is I'm mixing and matching many different formats in this timeline together. This top layer here, if I go through and reveal this in the project, you can see that this is a DVCPro HD-level footage. 960x540 is the resolution, 24 frames per second. If I come down here to some of these other clips and reveal them in the project, you'll see that we're mixing and matching some 1280x720 footage. We've got this particular clip here is 1920x1080 and because of the power of the workstation and the power of the processors, we can definitely mix and match all these different formats together in one timeline. Now, I can take this timeline and I can go ahead and blow this up full-screen here, and hit Play, and you can see that actually nothing has been pre-rendered at this point. This is actually the live play-back right off of the drives and you're seeing that we've got all the different layers showing how this particular scene was composited together and you can see the end result down here. Just to call this out, the Mercury Playback Engine within Premiere Pro is not just playing back six layers of video. The track in the clip that you see here in video 1 is actually a nested sequence, and if I double-click on this nested sequence, you can see that this particular timeline has three tracks in it and this track here--the one labeled background-- is actually an additional nested sequence for a total of 10 different layers of video playing back in my original timeline here. And again, nothing needs to be rendered. We've got all different types of effects going on. There's live chroma keying; there's garbage matting going on. If I go into this particular layer here and open up the effect controls, you can see that this has some lighting effects applied to it. I can go into a different layer here and you can see that there's keying going on. There's an animated garbage matte that I can click on here and you can see that there are different points associated with the garbage matte and these are actually animated over time. All of that plays back real time. That's thanks to the Mercury Playback Engine inside of Premiere Pro CS5.5, but also the fact that I have the hardware to back that up. The Mercury Playback Engine scales with the hardware, so as I'm starting to mix and match additional formats on the timeline, the CPU load is going to go up, and since this system is equipped with Xeon 5560 Processors, I have 12 physical cores so the load gets balanced across all of those different cores as I begin to stack more and more effects and get that real time playback on the timeline. Now, if you're editing and working with really high-end format, such as R3D footage, you really do need a professional-level workstation to be able to handle that, and again, inside of Premiere Pro, I can take R3D footage and actually bring this footage in and run this natively inside of Premiere. So here I've got a RED clip set up. I can go ahead and scrub through this, hit Play on this footage. I can even bring this up full-screen and you can see even though this is the actual R3D file-- Nothing's been transcoded or converted to anything else-- This is the raw file here. You can see that I'm getting very good performance and playback on the monitor here. Now, taking this--just to show you what this actually doing in the background here, I'm going to come down and actually open up my Task Manager and I'll go ahead and just maximize it so you can see the performance graph here and I'll bring this down to the bottom of the screen and I'll just hit Play on my video clip once again. And what you're able to see is that this is using all of the different cores in the system. We have 12 physical cores, plus we have Intel Hyper-Threading turned on. That's one of the benefits of the Xeon Processors is they also add Hyper-Threading, which adds additional performance; it actually looks--as far as Windows is concerned-- it looks like we have 24 cores, and you can see that every one of those cores is actually being utilized while playing back this very high resolution Raw file from R3D. And just to show that this is a raw clip here, let me go ahead and I'll close down the Task Manager here and we'll go back my regular interface. If I open up the Source Settings on this file, we actually have--this is new for CS5.5--this is the new R3D Source Settings Panel. This is where the R3D file--the Raw file--and if you're familiar with Camera Raw in Photoshop, you know what I'm talking about. The R3D footage actually takes the Raw Sensor data and records that into a file so when the file is decoded, we have to choose things like how the pixels are DeBayered from the single sensor recording, and then also choose how color is applied in the footage. And so this is the new panel for CS5.5 where we've added even more Raw control when you're working with R3D footage. One feature that I really liked--this new feature with the curve control here, where I can actually--if I just want to get some detail back in these mountains in the background here, I can just grab this little control slider, kind of pull down on some of the highlights, and you can see how that's brought back a lot of the detail in the mountains in the top of the shot here. When I hit OK, this actually loads the new settings into the footage, so if I come back here and I scrub through the footage, I can now see the mountains much clearer in the shot. Even when I blow this up full screen, you can see that it's now decoding with that change to the footage applied. And again, I'm not seeing any loss in playback speed or loss of quality because I now have tweaked the Raw settings. Now, going to some other functionality, working with all these formats and doing editorial work in Premiere is part of the puzzle, but in today's modern workflow, instead of just focusing on editorial, many people wear different hats and have to move from application to application. And again, this is another situation where having a workstation-class machine with workstation-grade processors like the Intel Xeon 5600 Series gives me all the power necessary to run multiple applications simultaneously. And Production Premium is designed to have a seamless workflow, where depending on what type of job I'm doing, I can very quickly move from app to app. As long as I have the horsepower behind to run all these different apps at the same time, I'm good to go; I don't have to stop and break my workflow to move from app to app. So just as a quick example of this, I'm going to go to a different timeline here where I've got a piece of footage and let's say we're going through our edit and we decide, you know what? We need to add maybe a special effect to the shot. We're going to need to utilize the power of After Effects. Seamlessly, I can move over to After Effects just by selecting this clip, right-clicking on it, and choosing Replace With After Effects Composition. And now, in one easy step, this actually comes over, creates a new composition over in After Effects and I can start to work in After Effects with this footage and do special visual effects with this footage, make changes to the footage, stabilize shots--there's a new Warp stabilizer inside of After Effects for doing motion stabilization. In this case, what I'm going to do is something relatively simple here. Maybe for this particular shot we want to have instead of it being a sunny day, we want to make it rainy, so I'm just quickly going to take a rain effect and throw it on here and I can start to tweak and modify how this rain effect is working. And let me just quickly go back to the beginning of my timeline here. I can start to play this back, I can see how the rain effect is going to work here in After Effects, but again, After Effects Premiere Pro all linked together. All I have to do is switch over to Premiere Pro and you can see that Premiere has actually taken--the After Effects composition is now replacing the footage in my timeline so if I come back here and I go back to the beginning of this and I want to see how this is going to cut together with the other footage, I can actually see the rain being applied to the footage over here in my program monitor. If I don't like that and I want to make a change to it, all I have to do is switch back over to After Effects and I can continue to tweak and modify this, maybe increase the opacity of the rain, increase the drop size a bit. Again, we'll just play back a section of this footage here and when I switch over to Premiere Pro, because I have the horsepower, because I have the RAM in the system, I have the CPUs to do this--I can just hit Play on this and I can see that actually playing back inside of Premiere Pro as well. Now let's say we've got our edit locked. We're ready to start tweaking audio. Production Premium CS5.5 has a new audio tool called "Audition" which has been added back to the Suite. Audition never really disappeared. If you're a longtime Audition user or you're familiar with Production Premium going way back, Audition's been around on the PC side. It's now cross-platform. It now replaces Soundbooth in the Suite and it's a full multi-track editor, a very fast engine behind it, and again, it's tied directly into Premiere Pro. So if I want to take this particular timeline, you'll see if I expand out the audio tracks, you can see that we've got a lot of different audio tracks. We've labeled each of these different audio tracks, and if I want to take this and really do some fine-tuned tweaking of the audio, Audition is the tool to do it. So what I'm going to do is take this timeline, go to Edit in Adobe Audition, choose Sequence, and when I do this, I can export out all of the audio for the entire sequence or part of the sequence, have audio handles and all of the individual stems of audio in my timeline will actually get to save to individual tracks, individual stems in an Audition project. So if I switch over to Audition, you can see here is the same project opened up after it's been saved to an Audition project, you can see all of the track names come across, all the individual stems of audio come across, and I can start to continue to work over here. I'm running Audition at the same time I'm running Premiere, at the same time I'm running After Effects, and at no time do I ever worry about "Am I going to run out of RAM?" "Am I going to run out of CPU load because I'm running all these applications?" That's the benefit of having a workstation-class machine and having workstation grade processors like the Intel Xeon 5600 Series that I have in this system here. So if I go back over to Premiere from Audition, one last thing that this can really help out with is the whole idea of export, being able to render files faster and being able to render smarter. So here, I'm going to go ahead and choose an export option here. I'll go ahead and choose a file ready to go out on YouTube and click the "Q" button, and this is going to bring up another component of Production Premium, the Adobe Media Encoder. Now, with the Media Encoder, I can go ahead and actually hit Play and start the queue on this. This file is now going through the rendering process. I can come down here, and if I want to watch it render, I can see it rendering here, but I can actually save a little bit of processing power by just turning that off. It's a new feature in the Media Encoder for CS5.5. Now, if I take this and I actually minimize this, I can continue to work inside of Premiere. I can even close down this project and begin working on a completely different project inside of Premiere and the Media Encoder is still actually rendering out in the background and it's doing that because, again, this is a workstation-class system. We have a lot of RAM in the system. We've got Intel Xeon processors with a lot of horsepower behind the scenes and what that enables me to do is actually render files out in the background at the same time that I am continuing to edit and continuing to use the other tools inside of Production Premium. So hopefully you've seen that the workflow--it's not so much just about editorial. It's about being able to use all of these different tools, taking full advantage of the Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere Pro, but also being able to move back and forth between all of the different tools within the overall Production Premium Suite to get the job done. It's all about getting the job done faster and working smarter and that's what a workstation class system enables you to do. Thanks again for watching. My name's Karl Soule. [ADOBE® TV] [tv.adobe.com]
