Adobe Premiere Pro CS6
Adobe Premiere Pro CS6
We've been envious of the Mercury Playback
engine since Adobe introduced it in Premiere Pro CS5. In Premiere Pro CS6,
Adobe has tucked in even more enhancements to make it probably one of the
fastest, if not the fastest, nonlinear editor on the planet. That presented a
few problems for us, though: Do we render using the wickedly fast GPU or the
CPU? Using the GPU could cut our times by several factors, but not all machines
support the GPU encoding. In the end, our problem was solved for us, as the GTX
690 is not currently supported by the Mercury Playback engine, so it's CPU all
the way. That doesn't mean the benchmark is a wimp. We find the multithreading
in CS6 to be impressive. All 12 threads on our Core i7-3930K are hammered
during the export. For the workload, we take 1080p video previously shot on a
Canon EOS 5D Mark II, add transitions and moving picture-in-picture frames with
additional 1080p footage, and export it to H.264 formatted for Blu-ray. The six
cores in our 3930K pay dividends, as our render took about 33 minutes. A stock
Ivy Bridge setup took about 53 minutes.
Gigapan Stitch.EFX 2.0
The GigaPan Epic Pro uses a motor to pan your DSLR to create gigapixel
images
New to our stable is Stitch.Efx 2.0. Let’s
face it, applying a sepia filter and scratch effects can be done on a $50
smartphone. Since PCs are about going big, we went as big as we could get. We
used a motorized GigaPan Epic Pro head, a Canon EOS 7D, and a 300mm lens with
1.4x teleconverter to shoot a panorama of 287 images totaling 1.63GB. Using
Stitch.Efx we stitch the shots into a single continuous 1.1 gigapixel panorama.
Yes, that's 1.1 billion pixels, or 1,100 megapixels. (That might sound like a
lot, but it's nowhere near the current record of 272 gigapixel also shot with
an Epic Pro head and 7D.I
About the first third of the process, where
the app aligns the images, is single-threaded and sensitive to clock and
microarchitecture. Ivy Bridge cores give the Sandy Bridge cores a good run for
the money in this section, but in the blend section it's all about the core
sand this is where we see SB's greater number of cores pull ahead of the Ivy
Bridge chip. As we stitched "only" 287 images together, it's mostly a
CPU test, but we can say the process created no fewer than 24,339 files during
the stitch, so small-file read and write performance should matter. With its
mix of single- and multithreaded performance, Stitch.Efx2.0 is a good
representation of today's software. Look for a review of the Epic Pro head on
MaximumPC.com —perhaps we'll be going for that record ourselves.
Techarp X264 HD 5.0
Techarp X264 HD 5.0
Since our Premiere Pro CS6 test actually
features Main Concept's popular encoding engine, we cast about for another
publicly available encoding test and found one in the newly released X264 HD
5.0. Created by tech website TechARP.com, the test uses the x264 library to
encode a 1080p video stream multiple times. The benchmark is multithreaded and
loves cores. It performs two passes, with the second pass compressing the
compressed material even further to save space. We run in 64-bit mode and
report the average frame rate for the second pass. In our testing, the
hexa-core Core i7 smashes the newer Core i7 Ivy Bridge in the nose by a
significant margin. We've found that encoders can be sensitive to memory
bandwidth, so we reconfigured our machine from quad-channel to dual-channel
mode (using larger DIMMs so the total amount of RAM would remain the camel and
found a negligible difference.
Proshow Producer 5.0
ProShow Producer 5.0
Favored by professional photographers,
ProShow Producer 5.0 is a popular slideshow creator that we've long used as a benchmark.
For our new benchmarks, we update to the latest version of the app, which adds
GPU acceleration, but only for video playback. When we started using ProShow
Producer five years ago, it was one of the few apps that could push quad-core
chips to their limit. Unfortunately, the app seems to top out with four cores,
but that's fine. We intentionally picked
ProShow Producer 5.0 knowing full well that
it doesn't scale with cores. Like Stitch.Efx 2.0, we wanted something that's
closer to most apps in performance instead of simply scaling as you add more
cores. Why pick something that won't push an eight-core chip to its limits? The
sad truth is that the vast majority of apps can't exploit the threads.
