Tag Archives: Choosing production tools

Few things in life are more fun than playing with the latest, greatest notebook computer. For the last few months, I’ve had the pleasure of working with HP’s EliteBook 8760w, which is the most powerful notebook I’ve ever tested. It’s a highly potent combination of Intel i7 CPU, NVIDIA 5010M GPU and an appropriately named DreamColor display. You can read …

Summary Depending upon the project type, rendering with GPU-acceleration in Creative Suite 5.5 can reduce rendering time by up to 92% over CPU-only rendering. Since NVIDIA’s CUDA technology is the only GPU that currently accelerates rendering in the Adobe Media Encoder and Premiere Pro, buying a notebook without NVIDIA hardware for CS5.5 production is a huge mistake. If you’re in …

Executive Summary: Adobe’s Mercury Engine, as powered by NVIDIA’s CUDA-enabled graphics cards, can be a huge time saver during project preview and rendering. But the performance benefit depends upon the source content and project type. In some instances, a high-end CUDA card delivers the most benefits; in others, investing in a dual-CPU workstation makes more sense. This detailed analysis looks …

Or, to be precise, the reviewer, Sundiata Cowels, say that I “hit the ball out of the park” (which won’t fit in a headline). Here’s the opening paragraph: The passing of Hurricane Irene (and the resultant power loss for five days) gave me ample time to catch up on my reading (by candle light no less). Streaming Media guru Jan …

This article is the second of a series on configuring your Windows workstation for producing with Adobe CS 5.5. The focus of this particular article is the optimal RAM configuration for both a single CPU and dual CPU system for producing with Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder. Figure 1. The HP Z400, our single CPU, 4/8-core contestant. As an …

I just released a 3 hour workshop entitled Producing Great Video with the Adobe Media Encoder CS 5.5. It was produced by Video2Brain, and you can view course details here. I produced three short videos to answer questions you may have about the workshop. They are: – What does the workshop cover? – Adobe Media Encoder is easy to use. …

This article is the first of a series on configuring your Windows workstation for producing with Adobe CS 5.5. The focus of this particular article is buying a single CPU vs. dual CPU system for producing with Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder. I’ll also cover whether it makes sense to enable or disable HTT (hyper-threaded technology) when available on …

Creative Cow just published a thorough and thoughtful story about switching from Final Cut Pro to Premiere Pro, written by Helmut Kobler, and entitled A Final Cutter Tries Out Premiere Pro. Kobler starts by noting that he had been considering moving from the Apple platform for several years, as he “started to sense that Final Cut, along with all of …

I thought I would share a video that Adobe just posted on their vision for professional video. The speaker is VP Jim Guerard, a thoughtful, impressive guy that I've met several times. Here are some of the statistics Jim discussed (which I cribbed fro

I shoot pretty much exclusively in HD now, but often render to SD DVDs. When it comes to choosing a sequence preset for Premiere Pro, I have two options, native HDV, which is the format that I typically shoot in, or 720×480 widescreen to match my DVD output. Which is better? Well, the quality difference isn’t significant, but it is …