Adobe’s Latest Creative Cloud Enhancements Make Great Use of NVIDIA’s GPUs

Having been announced at NAB earlier this month, this isn’t brand-new information, but I still find it interesting enough to talk about. A little while ago, I had learned that NVIDIA was working with Adobe in order to enhance RED 4K support within Premiere Pro, and the fruits of that labor are now being seen. With the latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro CC, users can utilize their NVIDIA GPU for the debayering process that RED’s format requires. In gist, this means that users can make use of their raw 4K footage in real-time from within Premiere Pro.

Why that matters: Prior to this enhancement, users have had to purchase RED’s own RED ROCKET add-in card to accomplish the same thing. Its cost? $4,750. For about the same price, users can instead opt for NVIDIA’s top-end Quadro K6000 and accomplish a lot more than the RED ROCKET can. You might think that such a move would upset RED, but not so. Jarred Land, President of RED, has this to say:

NVIDIA’s Quadro K6000 GPU is a great alternative for GPU-accelerated debayering, transitions, color grading and more for RED camera users. The addition of GPU debayering in Adobe Premiere Pro CC extends more workflow flexibility to video professionals with the RED camera while still leveraging the NVIDIA GPU features that they know and love

Enhanced RED 4K support is just one of the things brought to the latest CC build; others include GPU-accelerated portions of After Effects, SpeedGrade, Media Encoder, and even Anywhere. Further, NVIDIA’s also enhanced the performance of Premiere Pro on OS X up to 30%, thanks to CUDA optimizations.

The best part of this CC update is that the enhancements are not exclusive to NVIDIA’s Quadro series; GeForce components stand to gain the benefits just the same. It goes without saying that Quadro cards will come out on top overall, given the comprehensive tuning their drivers receive, but even so, performance boosts are always welcomed.