Benchmark Results: High-Definition Editing Test
Several minutes of 720p (1280x720 59.94 fps) high definition video were shot in and around Los Angeles and edited together, with transitions and color correction. The video format is Panasonic DVCPro100, shot with a HVX-200 camcorder onto P2 media--a video format used on many independent film productions due to higher quality than HDV and H.264 video.
Our results represent the time necessary to ‘Render Work Area’ in Adobe Premiere CS4. Unfortunately, Premiere CS5 was not available in time for the creation of the tests.
Premiere CS4 seems to benefit from Hyper-Threading. In the future, we’ll look at how this test performs on a standard disk instead of a RAID configuration to see how much this test depends on hard drive speed.
Blu-Ray Encoding Test
Here we encode the editing test to 720p (1280x720 59.94 fps) H.264 for Blu-ray, using Adobe Media Encoder. This is a direct encode of the Premiere project without any intermediate format.
The Blu-ray encode takes almost twice as long as the edit took to render. Adobe Media Encoder benefits equally from Hyper-Threading.
Photoshop Test
This is the standard Tom’s Hardware Photoshop test. Note that Photoshop barely notices Hyper-Threading, though we have seen it benefit from additional physical cores (the filters contained in this test are chosen for the thread-aware nature).
After Effects Test
This test consists of an After Effects project with motion graphics and three picture-in-picture frames. The project is in standard definition, but the source video for the clips is 720p HD.
After Effects CS4 responds very well to additional CPU cores.