Enabling the Mercury Playback Engine for Premiere Pro CS6 in Mountain Lion

Premiere Pro CS6

Adobe recently released Creative Suite CS6 with new versions of all their creative software including their video editing application, Premiere.

I have tried Premiere on a number of occasions before and never really liked it, but starting with version 5 it has been improving steadily.

One of the key new features is the "Mercury Playback Engine" which leverages the power of your graphics card to give you smoother playback and more real time effects without rendering.

Premiere CS6 takes this to an even higher level with improvements to the Mercury playback engine that provide a really slick and responsive interface.

In order to take advantage of the Mercury Playback Engine you need a computer with supported Graphics hardware. Adobe publish a list here.

If you look at this list you will see there are plenty of cards for the PC, but only three for the Mac Pro, and they're all a bit old. Following on from my post about running PC Graphics cards in a Mac Pro, I thought I would pass on my experience with getting Premiere CS6 to run with the Mercury Playback Engine enabled on a Mac Pro 3,1 running Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8)

My Mac Pro had been running Lion happily with a PC version of the GTX550ti graphics card, I recently updated the OS to Mountain Lion with no problems (well, I did see some issues with resuming from sleep mode but I just switched that off) However, the GTX550ti is not on Adobe's list of supported graphics cards.

There is an excellent guide to enabling support for the Mercury Playback Engine on PC's here, but I found the Mac instructions to be confusing, plus I know most people are not comfortable with messing around with the command line.

So here is my non-command line guide to enabling support for your graphics card in Mountain Lion.

First: Install Premiere CS6, you can download the trial version of Creative Suite 6 here.

Second: If you create a new project in Premiere and then check: Project > Project settings > General under the "Video rendering and Playback" tab you should only have the option "Mercury Playback Engine software only" If you see GPU acceleration as an option your card is already supported.

Third: Shut down Premiere, in finder go to the folder where Premiere is installed, by default it should be: Applications - Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. Command click on the Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.app and choose "Show package contents", then choose contents.

Fourth: In the contents folder you will see a file called "GPUsniffer.app" again command click the file and choose "Show package contents", then choose contents, then MacOS.

Fifth: Command click the file "GPUsniffer" and choose "open with> Terminal.app. A terminal window will open with information like this: (this is from my computer)

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti OpenGL Engine

OpenGL Version: 2.1 NVIDIA-8.0.51

GLSL Version: 1.20

Monitors: 1

Monitor 0 properties -

   Size: (0, 0, 1920, 1200)

   Max texture size: 16384

   Supports non-power of two: 1

   Shaders 444: 1

   Shaders 422: 1

   Shaders 420: 1

--- GPU Computation Info ---

Found 2 devices supporting GPU computation.

CUDA Device 0 - 

   Name: GeForce GTX 550 Ti

   Capability: 2.1

   Driver: 5

   Total Video Memory: 2047MB

OpenCL Device 1 - 

   Name: GeForce GTX 550 Ti

   Capability: 1.2

   Driver: 1.1

   Total Video Memory: 2048MB

logout

Copy the Name of the Graphics card, so here it is GeForce GTX 550 Ti (spaces and capitalisation are important)

Sixth: In finder, navigate back to the Premiere CS6 app contents, there you should see a file called "cuda_supported_cards.txt" double click the file to open it in the text editor. You will see a list of supported graphics cards, paste the name of your graphics card under the other cards listed. If Mountain Lion says that the file is protected and asks if you want to edit a copy, say yes. Then save the copy with the same name, overwriting the original. (at this point text edit on my computer hung, but the file was saved, so just force quit text edit)

Optionally, do the same with the file "OpenCL_supported_cards.txt" you may need to do this for AMD graphics cards that do not support CUDA

Seven: Launch Premiere Pro CS6 and check Project > Project settings > General, under the "Video rendering and Playback" tab you should now have the option "Mercury Playback Engine GPU acceleration"

Congratulations!! You have successfully enabled Mercury Playback Acceleration.

DISCLAIMER: I cannot guarantee this will work with your card but it should be fine with any Nvidia GTX 500 or 600 series card. I accept no responsibility for damage to your machine or lost data.

I have been playing with Premiere CS6 since enabling the Mercury Playback engine and have created a timeline with 8 layers of Chroma key at HD resolution that plays back in real time!!! Here is a screenshot of the project :-)

Eight layers of Chroma Key in real time!!!

Use the comments to let me know if you succeed, or to ask questions. Thanks and good luck!!

Macbook Pro retina display - perfect portable production?

Apples new Macbook Pro with retina display

On Monday in San Francisco Apple revealed their latest flagship laptop, the Macbook Pro with retina display. It's a beautiful, slim and powerful machine, with an Intel i7 processor and SSD drive, but of course the most striking thing about it is the screen. 2880 x 1800 pixels of retina display goodness.

Although it's a laptop, it's fast enough and powerful enough to be a serious portable production machine. It features two Thunderbolt ports allowing connection to external storage like the Promise Pegasus RAID arrays or Lacie's Little big disk or video i/o devices like the forthcoming Blackmagic Design Ultrastudio express or the AJA iO XT

Even the USB ports are USB3 so you can also use USB3 based storage which is easier to find than Thunderbolt storage and would also be compatible with PC based systems.

The thing I would really like to see paired with the Macbook though is this, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera.

Blackmagic Cinema Camera

When Blackmagic announced this at NAB they surprised everybody. A compact large format digital camera that produces 12bit RAW images at 2432 x 1366 pixels.

It records on to SSD disks which are mounted in the camera and it connects via Thunderbolt for media download. Pair this with the retina display Macbook and you've got a portable shooting, grading and editing system, as it comes complete with a copy of DaVinci Resolve software.

The Macbook has integrated graphics courtesy of the i7 processor but also comes with the Nvidia 650M discrete graphics chip which has 384 CUDA cores. That means it should be able to run Resolve at a very respectable speed, and should be equally at home with Avid Media Composer 6, Adobe CS6 or even Autodesk smoke.

Get back from location and plug it into a bigger screen, mouse and keyboard and you've got a full blown edit suite with reasonable performance.

I've got one on order so as soon as I get a chance I'll post some thoughts on the performance.

PC Nvidia Graphics cards in a Mac Pro UPDATED

One of my computers is a Mac Pro, which I've been very happy with, except for the restriction of using "Mac" versions of Pci-e Graphics cards, which are typically more expensive than their PC counterparts.

I had been running the machine with an Nvidia GT8800, which was a fairly powerful card, but was dismayed to see all the new cards coming out for the PC which were faster and cheaper.

There are ways to "hack" OSX to get it to accept a non-Mac graphics card but I was loathe to mess around with a working machine.

So I was very curious to read that in Mac OSX Lion (from 10.7.2 I believe), you can install a standard PC graphics card and a driver from Nvidia, and it just works :-)

I thought I would give it a try. I first installed the Nvidia driver for OSX 10.7.3 from here. I then installed an Nvidia GTX550ti graphics card. I chose the GTX550ti as it has a lower power requirement than some of the faster cards and I didn't want to overstress the power supply in my Mac Pro.

I crossed my fingers and powered up...

There were a few moments of doubt as there is no boot screen or spinning icon as the machine starts, but then the desktop appeared and everything was working!!

I also run Windows via boot camp and rebooting into windows I got the "found new hardware" message and the drivers for the graphics card were updated.

I haven't had a chance to run any serious benchmarks yet but I'll have a play with the system this weekend and see how it's running. First impressions are very good, the system seems happy and the graphics performance is definitely better. The GTX550ti only cost me €150 :-)

NB: Apple updated Lion to OSX 10.7.4 which broke the Nvidia driver, but Nvidia released a new driver here which apparently works. I haven't tested it personally. I'll wait until any other issues with 10.7.4 have been identified.

UPDATE: Last night I took the plunge and updated my Mac Pro to Mountain Lion 10.8

The GTX550ti is supported as standard, without installing any drivers from Nvidia, in fact the drivers installed by OSX show as driver version 295 which is newer than the 270 drivers for Lion.

Apparently Mountain Lion will support GTX 500 and 600 series cards natively but watch out for power consumption issues with the higher spec cards.

UPDATE 2nd August. I have had some instances of graphics corruption in Mountain Lion which I didn't have in Lion. I will keep an eye on the Nvidia site to see if they release updated drivers for Mountain Lion. The built in driver has a release number of 295 so it is behind the 300 series drivers that are current for other platforms.

UPDATE: It seems the GTX550ti has problems in Mountain Lion relating to sleep and recovery. For the moment I recommend you do NOT use the GTX550ti in Mountain Lion.

UPDATE 29th August. I have ordered a GTX660ti and will put up a new post with my experiences with that.
I have also found a cheap source of Mac Pro GPU power cables, you can order them from ebay here. I ordered two and they arrived the next day!

This post is getting quite old now, please see my other posts for more recent information.

Avid for $4.99?

Avid have released a version of Avid Studio for the iPad
It looks like a useful addition to iMovie but I doubt it will be very useful to the professional editor.
You can download it from the app store for $4.99 here

More information from Avid here

UPDATED! T-Mobile Netherlands are a bunch of Crooks part 2

My last post was getting a bit long so I have decided to continue the story in a new post.
I received the letter from T-Mobile which:
1/ Did not address the issue of the ridiculous WiFi charges
2/ Did not address the issue of the times that I was supposed to be connected
3/ Offered to let me pay by installments!!!
I have replied as follows:

Dear name removed,

Thank you for your letter of 10^th January.

Unfortunately you have not addressed the following points:

1. I did not knowingly agree to pay 25 cents per minute for a Wi-Fi connection during my stay in Germany between 25^th October and 7^th November. I therefore dispute these charges.

2. Aside from whether the above charges are justifiable on your part or agreed to on my part, they are factually incorrect and physically impossible. The Wi-Fi connection was offered at the Sheraton Four Points hotel. I was working at a venue more than 5 kms away. A Wi-Fi connection does not work over that distance. Yet the charges detail periods of 20 hours. I can prove with witnesses that I was not at the hotel at the stated times and neither was my phone.

3. I did buy two travel and surf packages at 15 euros for unlimited data access to cover the stated period. I am happy to pay for those charges and for my usual package.

If you send me a credit note for the Wi-Fi charges I will pay what is due.

I hope that we can settle this amicably otherwise I intend taking my case to the Geschillencommissie and if necessary to the European Commission.

Yours Sincerely,

Neil Roberts

I cannot believe that they can treat customers like this.

Don't use T-mobile!!!

I welcome any comments, advice or support.


UPDATE


This afternoon I was called by a name removed from T-mobile customer service.
He was very polite and explained that T-mobiles policy was that they did not feel the need to notify customers of the "outrageous" charges they levied for use of a Hotspot abroad.


He agreed that my situation was "ridiculous" and that the bill was "enormous"


He offered to only charge me for only one hour of Hotspot access per day, so reducing the bill from 2526.50 to 180 euros!! That's quite a reduction and I'm sure they thought I would take it gladly but this has now become a point of principle and I will not pay one cent for the Hotspot access. I would rather see them in court and see what a judge has to say about their sharp practices.


He accepted my opinion and has agreed to call me tomorrow morning before 12:00


I look forward to what he has to say and will keep you updated as to the outcome.


I almost hope they refuse as I really want to see this in court.


As always comments are welcome, even if you think I'm mad not to accept the offer. :-)

UPDATE 2 This morning I was called again by T-mobile.

They have agreed:
To cancel all charges for the Hotspot connection
To apologise for the time taken to resolve the matter and for the way I have been dealt with.
To reset my contract dates so I can update my phone
To send my wife a bunch of flowers as an apology for the stress and anxiety we have suffered.

They have asked that I remove the names of their employees from this blog which I am happy to do.


So, on the one hand I feel vindicated in my decision to complain about the charges and the way it was dealt with. On the other hand I was quite looking forward to getting this to court and seeing what a judge would say about their business practices. I am sure I cannot be the only person that this has happened to.


I goes to show, if you complain loudly enough, eventually someone will listen.
I'm sure the attention this blog and twitter have generated helped.


One final thought, if you have a contract with T-mobile, be VERY careful about connecting to Hotspots abroad.


Thanks for reading and for your messages of support. I will update this if there are further developments.


Neil Roberts 19th Jan 2012

T-mobile Netherlands are a bunch of crooks!!! Updated!

This is way off my usual topics but I have to get this out there.

I am originally English but have been living and working in Holland for the last seven years (my wife is Dutch :-) I speak Dutch but can't really write it. I have had a contract with T-mobile since 2008

At the end of October to the beginning of November I had to go to Munich for a week for an event I was working on. I paid T-mobile 15 euros for "Travel and Surf" unlimited data in Europe so that I could check email on my iPhone.

The Hotel I was staying in had a T-Mobile Germany hotspot, so when I used my phone it asked me if I wanted to connect. I checked the login page to see if there was an agreement with T-mobile Netherlands and sure enough under "roaming partners" there was an option to login in with my Netherlands account. There was no warning that this would cost anything.

I received no texts or emails from T-mobile informing me of any charges to my account, but obviously their system knew I was connected.

If I had known that there would be charges I would never have connected to the Hotspot as I had already paid for connection via the data network.

I would typically arrive back at the Hotel in the evening, my phone would automatically connect to the Hotspot, I would check my mail for maybe ten minutes, then maybe go for dinner and later put my phone on charge and go to bed.

At the end of November I received my bill from T-mobile, including charges for connecting to the Hotspot in Germany. But not charged by use of data but by time connected. They want to charge me for 7872 minutes at 25 cents per minute!!!!

November invoice:

Internet in het buitenland

26.10.11                15:24     DATA     Internet Hotspot  507:00 min.         106,51

27.10.11                00:00     DATA     Internet Hotspot  854:00 min.         179,41

28.10.11                01:20     DATA     Internet Hotspot  1018:00 min.       213,86

29.10.11                00:13     DATA     Internet Hotspot  976:00 min.         205,04

29.10.11                20:49     DATA     Internet Hotspot  158:00 min.            33,19

30.10.11                02:30     DATA     Internet Hotspot  654:00 min.         137,39

02.11.11                22:40     DATA     Internet Hotspot  433:00 min.            90,96

03.11.11                06:59     DATA     Internet Hotspot  936:00 min.         196,63

04.11.11                00:00     DATA     Internet Hotspot  1219:00 min.       256,09
05.11.11                00:00     DATA     Internet Hotspot  1117:00 min.       234,66

Totaal Internet in het buitenland                       7872:00 min.                  1653,74

If you look at the time they're charging for it doesn't make sense. 1219 minutes is over 20 hours! I didn't stay in the hotel all day, I was working at an event 5 kilometres away!


I rang T-mobile customer services to ask what was going on. They told me I had to go to a T-Mobile store to make a complaint so I went to the T-Mobile store in Amstelveen and spoke to the manager. He told me this kind of thing happens all the time and they would probably cancel the bill. He said it would take 4 or 5 days and then someone would contact me.

I heard nothing until mid December when I received another bill, with another 2234 minutes of connection time. So now I am being charged for 10,106 minutes at 25 cents per minute.

That's 2,526.50 euro plus 19% tax!!!

December invoice:

Internet in het buitenland

06.11.11                00:13     DATA    Internet Hotspot  1241:00 min.        260,71

07.11.11                00:00     DATA    Internet Hotspot  993:00 min.          208,61

Totaal Internet in het buitenland                       2234:00 min.                   469,32

I tried to speak to T-Mobile customer support but if they don't want to deal with your case they just hang up on you. Eventually I spoke to a name removed in their billing department and she told me that the case had been decided and I had to pay.

I pointed out that I had paid for unlimited internet access but she said "Oh that's different"

I pointed out that I was not informed that connecting to the Hotspot was billable and she said "Oh we don't have to tell you"

I pointed out that the European commission had set a 50 euro cap for data roaming in Europe and she said "Oh that doesn't apply here"

I suggested that what they were doing was like stealing and she said "Oh we can't be doing anything illegal or we wouldn't be allowed to do it"

There was no negotiation, no apology and no option to speak to anyone else.

I am refusing to pay the bills until I have made my case with the Ombudsman and if necessary with the European Commission.

If you have an account with T-mobile be very careful when you travel abroad.

If anyone has any information or advice that might help me in my case with T-mobile please feel free to contact me using the comments below.

UPDATE
I have also posted this information on a T-mobile forum and have now had a couple of replies from a moderator with the screen name CindyS. This was the first:


I'm sorry to hear you assumed using a T-Mobile Hotspot outside The Netherlands was for free. On our website you can find information about using Hotspots: http://www.t-mobile.nl/mobiel-internet/hotspots. There you can read that using a Hotspotconnection abroad costs €0,25 per minute. 


The €59,95 cap for data roaming only applies to using mobile internet on a mobile network, not a Wi-fi spot where a login is required.


To which I replied:

How convenient. It would have been nice to be TOLD that the hotspot was not free. Your system knew I was connected but there was no text or other message to warn me of the charges.

How do you explain the connection being on for over 1200 minutes in a day? 
Also, why do you charge by the minute rather than for data used?


This was her reply:

The connection time is registered with your simcard.

In what way T-Mobile charges the usage of a certain service is a policy decision.



Unbelievable! The connection time is registered with my simcard, so even if it makes no logical sense, it must be right. As we all know, computer systems never make mistakes :-)


And the way T-Mobile charge is "a policy decision" Well yes I can see it's T-mobiles "policy" to screw as much money out of their customers as they possibly can!


Thanks CindyS for the ammunition. :-)


Oh yes, if there is an ad for T-mobile under this post (how ironic) please click on it.
That way I might just get some of my money back! Haha :-)

UPDATE 2
Some more posts from the forum, my replies:

On Monday:

So you have no answer as to why I was not informed of the charges?

You think it makes sense that I am being charged for connecting to the Hotspot for 20 hours in a day when I wasn't even in the Hotel that long?
And the way you charge usage is "ä policy decision" , in other words, you can charge whatever you like?
Do you think it is fair and justified that I should be charged 3000 euros to check my email?

Yesterday:

Nothing to say?

No corporate answer as to why I was not told about the charges?

You think 25 cents per minute for 10,000 minutes is perfectly reasonable?

Come on CindyS, make me smile :-)


Then today this:

T-Mobile in all fairness expects travellers are aware that the costs of the services they use abroad are higher than in The Netherlands. This information is available on our website.

It's the responsibility of the traveler to keep control of the duration of use and therefore also the costs. Though I really regret that this was not the case for you, it's T-Mobile's position that you are finally responsible for start and termination of a data connection.

I agree you are confronted with an extreme situation. Therefore I have brought up your case within our organisation, although I can not guarantee this will result in a different outcome. As soon as I receive an answer you will be informed.

At the moment there's a very high demand for our services and that is why you had to wait a while for a reply from a moderator.


Well, there's hope for the world yet :-) Thank you CindyS for this more human response and I look forward to hearing from you.

UPDATE 3 

Had an email chasing the November invoice and threatening to block my phone if I don't pay.


I rang customer support and spoke to  name removed, who was very helpful.


He checked and found out that my complaint is being dealt with and I will be receiving a letter "shortly". In the meantime I don't have to pay the invoice and I wont be blocked. Phew!


I look forward to the letter and will post the content here. Fingers crossed :-)


UPDATE 4
I suppose it was foolish of me to hope that common sense might prevail. Sigh.
This is T-mobiles response to my situation:

First of all I paid for unlimited internet access (their words not mine) when I bought a "Travel and Surf" package.


Secondly I only logged on to the T-mobile WiFi Hotspot because it accepted my T-mobile Netherlands user name and password under "roaming partners" there was no mention of charges on the login page. 


At no point did I agree to paying 25 cents per minute for access to the Hotspot


There was no email or SMS message to tell me I was running up charges. There was no warning whatsoever. I do not call that "as much information as possible"


Thirdly, I only raised the issue of the data roaming cap after they tried to bill me 3000 euros for the privilege of checking my emails! I did not "assume" the cap for data roaming applied to the WiFi Hotspot. I believed I had already paid for access to the internet via the T-Mobile network.


So they apologize for the inconvenience? I don't call a bill for 3000 euros "inconvenient", I call it robbery. Charging 25 cents per minute for access to wifi is blatant extortion.


They want to offer me the possibility to pay in instalments? I am not going to pay one cent of the charges for the Hotspot. I will see them in court trying to defend their charges.


T-mobile customer service has to be some of the worst in the world. It's not surprising they can't even spell customer.


This isn't over. 
Over 1000 people have seen this page now. 
Please forward the link to everyone you know. 
We wont be treated like this.

Continued here: http://nrsotw.blogspot.com/2012/01/t-mobile-netherlands-are-bunch-of.html

New version of Sony Vegas Pro 11

Sony have released new versions of Vegas Pro 11.

Version 11 uses GPU (Graphics processor unit) acceleration quite extensively and there have been some teething problems getting it to run smoothly on some systems.

The latest builds, 510 for 32 bit systems and 511 for 64 bit systems (downloadable here), address a lot of these issues and I have found them to be more stable and with faster performance than the previous builds.

There are release notes here with details of the improvements.

Go ahead and download them and let me know if you have any comments.