Premiere Pro CS4
We wanted to leverage as much of the work done by Chris Angelini in his “Can Your PC Use 24 Processors?” story as possible, so in addition to his custom After Effects load, we also replicated his Premiere Pro work set. Part of this job involved created a custom setting scenario in which the 23.976 FPS default Blu-ray speed (24 FPS in CS5) was doubled to 59.94 FPS. As Chris did, we recorded both the render time as well as the export time with Premiere’s Adobe Media Encoder (AME) in order to assess two key parts of the video workflow process. The single point where our test data replicates Chris’s render and AME times within 20 seconds (980X with 12 threads and HT enabled) confirms that we’re on the same track and working with solid results.
In a workstation setup, Chris didn’t see much positive scaling when moving from the i7 into the Xeon line. Working solely with the i7 and modifying core counts, we see a much more obvious and rewarding progression. Once more, you don’t get as much kick in the move from four cores to six as from two to four, but the benefits of each core increase are clear. Moreover, we see the 10% to 20% benefit from enabling Hyper-Threading that we’ve been expecting all along. Without a doubt, the six-core Intel approach is the way to fly with Premiere Pro CS4.
Unlike our other two Creative Suite apps, Premiere Pro makes much more effective use of all available processor cores, including virtual ones. We don’t see any real breathing room with utilization appear until we hit 12 threads.
