Notable fixes
• The Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 5.0.2 update adds Windows-based Mercury Playback Engine (MPE) support for new NVIDIA cards (GTX 470, Quadro 4000, Quadro 5000).
• The RED importer is now compatible with current RED firmware (build 30, v30.5.0), Mysterium X, and the most recent Color Science.
• Support for import and export of RED RMD files to and from REDCINE-X software.
• Support for XD-CAM HD export.
• Support for QuickTime files from JVC solid-state cameras.
• Support for source timecode in XDCAM 4:2:2 footage.
• Support for RED Rocket cards.
• Support for Broadcast Wave audio file format.
• Support for Broadcast Wave in OMF export.
• 10-bit DisplayPort support for NVIDIA Quadro cards (Windows only).

Finally official support for the new Fermi Nvidia cards. Seems a bit weird that the higher end GTX 480 and up aren’t listed.

After a couple of weeks of testing, I’ve concluded that I’ll never buy a Canon branded LP-E6 battery again. 7D and 5D owners can now rejoice.
Yes they last just as long as the real thing.
Yes they are chipped and will tell you the battery level.
Yes they are more than 3 times cheaper then the real thing.
What more is there to say?

Edit 24/08/10: I forgot to mention they also charge fine in the original Canon chargers.

I got them of if you’re wondering where I got them from but it looks like the same battery has flooded the market as can be seen by the multitude of eBay sellers around the world selling the same looking battery.

Well the unfinished work is piling up and there’s nothing like building a new editing machine to get the motivation cranking again. Instead of going out and getting a custom built machine, being a cheapskate, I’d thought I’d save the $50 and put the bunch of components together myself. I’ve done it numerous times before and it’s really just like the adult’s equivalent of putting together a Lego set.

My budget for the whole PC including keyboard, monitors and everything else to get it up and running came to $1800au. My goal was to have something that could chew through any kind of footage I could throw at it and be compatible with the mercury engine in Adobe Premiere CS5. The result was as follows:

CPU: 2.8ghz – Currently the cheapest i7 quad core out there in the new LGA1366 socket spec.
Motherboard: – The cheapest most feature packed motherboard I could find locally. Includes the new USB 3.0 and SATA 3 specs. Good overclocking options too.
Ram: – No thrills 6GB set of ram. I’m planning on doubling this to 12gigs soon.
Video card: Zotac with 1gb of ram. With the GPU hack, I’d save a couple of hundred bucks on getting GTX285 with all the mercury playback engine benefits. This actually outperformed my other computer’s GTX285 in the Cinebench OpenGL test. I think the fact that the other computer has a Q6600 in it has more to do with that though.
Power Supply Unit or PSU: One of the most underrated components. Usually the first point of failure in a computer system so I went with a trusty psu. I wished I had paid a bit extra and got the with modular cables though. Modular cables make the build so much easier and neater.
Monitor: 23.6″ Wide LCD monitor. Doesn’t have the colour fidelity or bit depth of my Dell 24″ 2407. Really noticable in After Effects when you create any gradients and banding occurs where on the Dell it’s smooth as. It still makes an acceptable image though and at a very good price.
Keyboard and Mouse: – The worst keyboard I’ve ever used. You get what you pay for here and the keyboard is absolutely rubbish. You have to really push down hard on the buttons and if you’re a fast typer then expect to go back a lot to fill in letters that didn’t register. I don’t think they’ll offer a refund for this so I plan on doing a snuff film starring this keyboard.
Hard-drive: drive. Despite the green in the title, it’s still 7200rpm with 64mb of cache. I’ve got a bunch of other drives in ESATA cases to do the media handling.
All housed in a Black ATX Tower Case. I wanted something to look plain and sexy without looking like a neon world of warcraft base.

So how does it perform? Out of the box on stock settings, the performance in Premiere CS5 was frustratingly underwhelming. Things lagged like it was 1998 again and I couldn’t understand why. Even though it was stock, 2.8ghz should be plenty.
I soon found out what the cause was when I started to overclock the beast. The cpu underclocks itself when it’s not doing anything to save power but even when it was doing something, ie, trying to play a timeline with 7D footage in it, it wouldn’t kick into high gear and the playback kept stuttering.

To fix that I found a bios overclock setting for my combo of the i7 930 and my motherboard on the internet. Its now running at 3660MHz with the cpu throttling feature disabled and now the thing performs like it should. It now handles all sorts of heavy editing or rendering requirements with ease. I forgot to mention I also installed a cooler on the i7, otherwise it would be running at over 100degrees on the stock Intel cooler. It currently runs at around 80 degrees whilst running Prime95, ie, the most stressful thing you could do to your computer. Very necessary if you want a rock solid system. If it can run Prime95 for hours on end without crashing or coming up with an error then your computer can do normal video rendering on all cores without a sweat.

Here’s hoping Intel doesn’t come out with a must have CPU with 52 cores in the next year or so. That would really piss me off.

Update (30/07/10): These i7 chips are really stellar overclockers. I now have the computer running at the magic 4GHz mark with the Coolermaster V8. I could bump the voltages higher and go faster but 4GHz is plenty for now.
When you’re doing actual work on these computers, stability is extra important. Some other stress test programs I’ve found to make sure your computer is running rock solid are:
IntelBurnTestV2 Stresses your cpu more than Prime95. Expect up to 10c higher temps.
LinX Similar to IntelBurnTest. Find out whether your overclock is stable quicker than with Prime95
Memtest When you overclock your base clock speed, chances are you’ll also be overclocking your ram. Use this to see if your ram runs error free.

Being a fan of the first one, I’m blown away by the added features. Just have a look at Stu’s video to see what I mean.

For this trip, I’ve decided to travel light and will bring the following items to document my journey:
Canon 7D
Tamron 17-50mm VC
Velbon Ultrastick Monopod
Zoom h4n
Manfrotto Shoulder Brace
Glidetrack SD compact dolly.
I’m most excited about the last thing on the list, the Glidetrack. The thing is tiny and the smooth dolly moves I get out of it makes the $260AU or so I spent on it (used) worth it. For those that don’t know, it’s basically a very small dolly that uses lubricated plastic bearings rather than wheels. It can also be called a slider as the dolly moves you can get out of it can be very deliberately slow. Just go to their website or search on Vimeo for glidetrack to see a plethora of examples. The only problem is, I’m afraid it’ll make me a one trick pony as I’ve seen it occur to others. The gloss of the slow dolly move loses its shine when it’s used for every shot in your edit. I can see why it’s so overused though, it can turn a dull composition of anything into magic.

Simple, cheap and awesome, what more could you want?

I assume the update must also allow the other GeForce cards to support more than 3 layers with the hack I previously wrote about. Can someone confirm if so or whether their card even works at all now?

Way to go Adobe!!

Looks like Sony is releasing a very compact DSLR and an interchangeable lens camcorder. What seems half arsed about this release is the lack of frame-rate options beyond 30p. I mean, what the hell! Did Sony have their heads in the sand during the whole 5D II and 7D phenomena?

What’s cool about it though is the swivel LCD screen and compact form factor of both units. I’ve always wanted a DSLR that I could fit in my shirt pocket (with a pancake lens of course).

A few specs and pics.

SONY NEX-3 Specifications

Image Sensor: 14.2 million effective pixels.
Metering: Multi pattern, centre-weighted and spot.
Sensor Size: APS-C-sized CMOS (23.4×15.6mm).
Lens: Sony E Series mount.
Shutter Speed: 30 to 1/4000 second. Flash sync: 1/160 sec.
Continuous Shooting: seven fps.
Memory: Memory Stick PRO Duo, PRO-HG Duo, SD, SDHC, SDXC cards.
Image Sizes (pixels): 4592×3056, 4592×2576, 3344×2224, 3344×1872, 2288×1520, 2288×1280.
Movies: 1280×720, 848×480, 640×480 at 30 fps.
Colour Space: sRGB, Adobe RGB.
LCD Screen: 7.5cm LCD (921,600 pixels).
File Formats: JPEG, RAW, JPEG+RAW, MPEG4.
ISO Sensitivity: Auto, 200 to 12,800.
Interface: USB 2.0, HDMNI, AV.
Power: Rechargeable lithium ion battery, DC input.
Dimensions: 117.2×62.6×33.4mm WHDmm.
Weight: 297 g (inc battery and card).

For those that don’t know, the hack is simply adding your card’s name to a text file list in your Premiere folder.
Copy and paste the list above into your “cuda_supported_cards.txt” file in your Premiere CS5 folder. Get and install one of the cards listed and then enable the Mercury GPU Playback setting in your project settings. Voila! Cheap supercomputing editing for the masses!

Update: It’s best to stick to the higher quality brands of Nvidia cards. Cheaper versions have been known to use cheaper capacitors that could blow a lot sooner than the solid caps used by brands such as BFG, EVGA, ASUS, GIGABYTE. Stay away from brands like Sparkle and other generic ones.

Update: Confirmed list of GeForce cards with hack.

Many of you would have heard all the excitement about the new Mercury Playback Engine (MPE) in Premiere Pro CS5. With a GTX 285 (The cheapest card Adobe have certified for MPE support) I can now make rendering effects and transitions a thing of the past. As long as I use the Mercury accelerated plug-ins of course but these include all the useful things you’d ever need such as curves and levels. If you add a non MPE enabled plug-in, the timeline will go red (from yellow) and playback will start to stutter requiring the dreaded wait on render times.

Even with 4 layers of 7D footage in Picture in Picture, Premiere plays them back without hitch. The speed of my hard-drives is likely going to be the limiting factor in how many layers I can add without stuttering playback.

Adobe have crippled the performance of the GTX 285 to only 3 layers of realtime support with effects. This means if I have 4 layers in PIP and they all have effects, the timeline will go red and rendering will have to occur. This limitation doesn’t apply to all the supported quadro cards which leads me to believe Adobe are doing this to appease the Nvidia gods to help boost their Quadro sales.

Most people know the only difference between the Quadro cards and the Geforce cards is not it’s hardware but it’s firmware and drivers. Take for instance the Quadro FX 4800. It is the top of the line Quadro card (before the Fermi cards get released) but it’s hardware is mostly identical to the GTX 285. The same with the Quadro FX 3800 and the GTX 260, same hardware but different firmware and drivers. The lack of support of all the Geforce 2xx series would make sense if the MPE utilised features of the Quadro drivers but they don’t. Their support of the GTX 285 is proof plus MPE is a Cuda accelerated feature and all the Geforce cards from the cheapest GT 240 to the most expensive Quadro FX has had this CUDA feature.

Why then doesn’t MPE support all these cards? It’s simple, Adobe wants you to have to buy the most expensive Quadro cards or the once top of the range GTX card. Their partnership with Nvidia has become quite obvious through this MPE support list. Their excuses that the Geforce cards don’t have enough ram or overheat more readily causing them to underclock is balony (most geforce cards now come with over 1 gig of ram, the same as the lower spec Quadro cards, the geforce cards also have better cooling due to the amount of work the card has to do to render today’s gaming graphics at hours on end).

Their ruse has been found out as a clever chap on the Cinema 5D forums has found out a simple hack to allow a cheap $70 Geforce GT 240 plus most of the other GT 2XX series to enable the MPE GPU mode in Premiere Pro CS5.
The following is a copy and paste from user “marvguitar”

I figured out how to activate CUDA acceleration without a GTX 285 or Quadro… I’m pretty sure it should work with other 200 GPUs. Note that i’m using 2 monitors and there’s a extra tweak to play with CUDA seamlessly with 2 monitors.

Hope this helps

There you go, users have reported that as long as their card has over 786MB of ram, they’ve seen exponential performance increase with a GT 240 card that can be had for under $100. GTX 470 and 480 users have also mentioned it works with their cards although with some render bugs that can be worked around.

Download the trial from Adobe and get yourself a supported video card with over 786MB of ram and give it a go.

By the way, this post may seem critical of Adobe but they do deserve major kudos for finally releasing a stable and fast editor using GPU tech that has been around for years. Business is business and if they needed to appease Nvidia’s marketing department for help with implementing this CUDA technology then so be it. I wonder if they made it so easy to add support to other cards on purpose? You have to appease business partners but the customer is always king!