Resources For the Indie Film-maker
Archive for May, 2010
Adobe must be listening. GTX 285 no longer artificially crippled!
May 28th
Adobe have just released an update for Premiere Pro CS5 that uncripples the GeForce GTX 285 from only 3 layers with realtime effects. I guess they finally realised that their customers are no fools to be taken advantage of.
This pretty much negates the need for those costly, Quadro cards.
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!!
Sony Joins the Party (half arsed)
May 13th
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).
Premiere CS5 – Mercury Playback Engine Confirmed List of Cards (with hack)
May 12th
With the widely known simple hack that I previously wrote about, Premiere CS5′s new CUDA Mercury Engine now works with a greater number of Nvidia Geforce cards. Below is a list of GeForce cards that have been confirmed working by members on various forums. Please keep in mind your card will need 768MB of ram as a minimum. Best to get one with 1GB to play safe.
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.
Premiere CS5 – Mercury GPU Acceleration on the cheap
May 7th
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.
Here are the steps:
Step 1. Go to the Premiere CS5 installation folder.
Step 2. Find the file “GPUSniffer.exe” and run it in a command prompt (cmd.exe). You should see something like that:
———————————————————————————————————————————–
Device: 00000000001D4208 has video RAM(MB): 896
Device: 00000000001D4208 has video RAM(MB): 896
Vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
Renderer string: GeForce GTX 295/PCI/SSE2
Version string: 3.0.0
OpenGL version as determined by Extensionator…
OpenGL Version 2.0
Supports shaders!
Supports BGRA -> BGRA Shader
Supports VUYA Shader -> BGRA
Supports UYVY/YUYV ->BGRA Shader
Supports YUV 4:2:0 -> BGRA Shader
Testing for CUDA support…
Found 2 devices supporting CUDA.
CUDA Device # 0 properties -
CUDA device details:
Name: GeForce GTX 295 Compute capability: 1.3
Total Video Memory: 877MB
CUDA Device # 1 properties -
CUDA device details:
Name: GeForce GTX 295 Compute capability: 1.3
Total Video Memory: 877MB
CUDA Device # 0 not choosen because it did not match the named list of cards
Completed shader test!
Internal return value: 7
—————————————————————————————————————————————
If you look at the last line it says the CUDA device is not chosen because it’s not in the named list of card. That’s fine. Let’s add it.
Step 3. Find the file: “cuda_supported_cards.txt” and edit it and add your card (take the name from the line: CUDA device details: Name: GeForce GTX 295 Compute capability: 1.3
So in my case the name to add is: GeForce GTX 295
Step 4. Save that file and we’re almost ready.
Step 5. Go to your Nvidia Drivercontrol panel (im using the latest 197.45) under “Manage 3D Settings”, Click “Add” and browse to your Premiere CS5 install directory and select the executable file: “Adobe Premiere Pro.exe”
Step 6. In the field “multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration” switch from “multiple display performance mode” to “compatibilty performance mode”
Step 7. That’s it. Boot Premiere and go to your project setting / general and activate CUDA
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!