SANTA CLARA, CA — AMD (www.amd.com) and Adobe (www.adobe.com) have announced a new solution to meet the demands of 4K and 8K video workflows that enables seamless editing of popular video formats, accelerating the production process while giving editors a high level of control of their projects using high-resolution, uncompressed footage. A 2018 NAB Show launch, the new version of Adobe Premiere Pro CC includes native support for AMD Radeon Pro SSG graphics, a solution designed specifically for video production that combines the performance and capabilities of AMD “Vega” GPU architecture with 2TB of NVMe storage integrated onto the graphics card.
Together, Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Radeon Pro SSG represent a compelling solution for high-resolution video production, supporting 4K and 8K footage in popular native camera formats, including ARRI AMIRA, Canon XF and RAW, Panasonic AVC and P2, REDCODE RAW, and Sony XDCAM, XAVC, and RAW.
Working directly with these source formats typically requires extraordinary computational performance and memory capacity to decode them in real-time. The Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Radeon Pro SSG workflow reduces the CPU and memory bottlenecks traditionally encountered, allowing editors to work with uncompressed visual fidelity.
“The promise of filming in 4K and 8K has always been about removing creative constraints, about providing more creative control with higher-resolution footage. Unfortunately, those creative ambitions have been sidelined by technology limitations that have made 4K and 8K editing practically impossible,” says Ogi Brkic, GM, professional graphics, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “Today, reality catches up to ambition as Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Radeon Pro SSG deliver the high-resolution workflow you’ve always dreamed of, enabling accelerated editing of a wide range of media, letting creators bring their visions to life in uncompressed 8K glory.”
“Adobe Premiere Pro CC has always been the standard bearer for innovation in editing, introducing 4K, 8K and 360-video workflows to enable editors to expand their capabilities and explore their creativity,” says Sue Skidmore, head of partner relations for Video at Adobe. “Today, through our collaboration with AMD, we’re taking high-resolution editing to a new level in Adobe Premiere Pro CC with support for Radeon Pro SSG. Collectively, Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Radeon Pro SSG represent the ideal solution for 4K and 8K workflows, with software and hardware designed to allow your creativity to shine.”
Most productions today film in high resolution — 4K or 8K — to provide the greatest flexibility in post production; however there has been no effective way to edit multiple streams of that footage at full resolution. Editors have been forced to do their work with proxy files rather than the original high-resolution footage, transcoding to lower resolutions that are more easily managed by most workstations. With the combination of Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Radeon Pro SSG, editors can now work with multiple streams of 4K or 8K footage at full resolution in an uncompressed format as smoothly as they could with lower-quality proxy files. The solution reduces CPU utilization and eliminates the burden on local memory, allowing edits to footage while preserving the base cache if anything needs to be reverted or changed, and serves as a persistent cache that can be moved from workstation to workstation as needed without having to reload footage.
Adobe Premiere Pro CC with native support for Radeon Pro SSG is now available, and the Adobe Premiere Pro CC + Radeon Pro SSG workflow is expected to be supported on validated workstation platforms soon.