Right now, it's a great time to be creating high-end video productions and quickly crafting photo-realistic 3D elements. Ultra-high resolution 4K content is becoming the standard in the movie industry, producers are demanding more and more sophistication in visual effects and photo-realistic 3D animation, and the pace of the industry demands quicker turnaround of every new project.
Adobe Creative Cloud video solutions, which include Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC, SpeedGrade CC and Adobe Anywhere, combined with the industry-standard imaging tool, Photoshop CC, provide a tremendous set of tools to the creative artist. But there's just one snag.
Whilst the progress in software capabilities has increased dramatically over the last few years, for many of us, our hardware hasn't quite managed to keep up and render times remain the most obvious bottleneck in a typical project workflow.
New generation
Admittedly, there are some scripts available for the background rendering of Adobe After Effects projects, but the fact remains that this processor intensive task will still drain system resources - meaning that significant progress towards either the next stage of a project, or a different one altogether, can be sluggish.
With that in mind it is well worth taking a look at adding a GPU to your workstation. NVIDIA's Quadro and Tesla GPUs are specifically designed to boost performance in commonly used Adobe creative tools, eliminating the need for traditional time-consuming editing methods.
Using GPUs allows you to massively accelerate your workflow. NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla GPUs have native technologies that allow more efficiency, less waiting time for rendering and far greater creative freedom and simplicity.
The support that NVIDIA's GPUs offers to Adobe's creative tools allows you to take advantage of a superior creative environment for even the most sophisticated workflows. Visual effects in Adobe Premiere Pro that used to render a few frames per second now run in real-time on a GPU-accelerated workstation or Adobe Anywhere platform.
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Photo-realistic 3D motion graphics that would take hours to create can now be done in minutes with After Effects. Professional layer-based colour grading is quick and easy with the Lumetri Deep Colour Engine in both SpeedGrade and Adobe Premiere Pro, and Photoshop continues to leverage the GPU for intuitive, fluid image creativity.
The new Adobe Anywhere collaborative video workflow solution is accelerated by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and allows creative artists to leverage a number of Adobe creative tools for seamless collaboration using centralised cloud-based media, across virtually any network, whilst retaining ultra-fast performance and smooth remote accessibility.
Speed hike
For motion graphics artists, working in 3D space is becoming the norm and After Effects CC has a number of tools that simplifies and accelerates the workflow with a 3D ray-traced rendering engine based on NVIDIA's OptiX technology. This means that you can simply and quickly design realistic geometric 3D text and shapes, eliminating the need for time-consuming external 3D tools.
Before the use of GPUs, creating and editing scenes would rely on the CPU, meaning the whole system took a hit due to the intense processing required. GPUs are designed to offload the CPU from graphics intensive applications and will perform up to 39X faster than a high-end CPU, allowing you to create and play back more complex scenes, in a faster, more effective, real-time environment.
By taking this burden away from the rest of the system, you can carry on using your workstation for other background tasks that rely on the CPU without compromising on its power or performance. The net result is that each component of the overall system has less pressure on it, so it can be matched to its most suited task.
Freedom to create
The technology behind the speed of Premiere Pro is the powerful Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, co-developed by Adobe and NVIDIA. It leverages NVIDIA graphics cards and CUDA technology to deliver real-time interactivity, making the design experience smooth and intuitive.
There is nothing more frustrating than having your creativity stifled by spinning icons and slow tools. Large file sizes can also have a huge negative impact, with layered files easily pushing them up into the gigabytes.
Commonly used Photoshop CC tools improved with the GPU, include the Blur Gallery with simple, on-canvas controls for immediate results, the new Smart Sharpen tool to make precisely controlled shadows, highlights, and noise reduction as well as many other tools.
Easier life
So whether you're a texture painter, re-toucher, photographer or concept artist, GPU accelerated tools and workflows make life easier. Nested groups of layers, with multiple adjustment layers, filters and masks are turned from borders on realistic working to new possibilities, opening up effectively limitless opportunities for creative endeavour.
In short, creative artists everywhere have never had it so good. With Adobe packing its latest versions of After Effects and Photoshop with some serious power, and NVIDIA's Quadro and Tesla GPUs providing a faster and smoother experience for artists, you'll have more time on your hands to spend being truly creative.
