Hi David

When do you think the real-time Engine for CS4 is ready ?


Thanks Rudy

David, will the CS4 issues be remedied with a single update, or will things like RTE and the CFHD Project Manager issues be resolved separately?

Any news for the realtime for cs4

Thanks Rudy

While I get that when something is broken it should be fixed, and if something is advertised it should be delivered etc but have you guys seen the tech sneek peek for CS5?

The Genesis Project: Technology Sneek Peek: Adobe® Mercury Playback Engine (http://blogs.adobe.com/genesisproject/2009/11/technology_sneek_peek_adobe_me.html)

Add to that the word is CS5 will ship April this year...basically makes cineforms RTE obsolete

Yeah, there are several threads in which Mercury is discussed. This is probably the main one: http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/attend-world-premiere/469617-cs5-x64-mercury-playback-engine.html

The marketplace will sort out the products once they are available. Cineform's RTE release date has repeatedly slipped. Adobe is touting Mercury, but it isn't out yet either and of course an official demo video is going to show a product favorably; note that they are using a monster, optimized system. Will it make RTE obsolete? Uknown. One could speculate that some folks might opt to make use of RTE with their existing hardware rather than bundle a very expensive workstation with their CS4-to-CS5 upgrade. Or maybe Mercury and RTE will work together to give even better performance? Maybe compatibility issues with Mercury are the latest reasons for delay? We don't know.

And of course, Cineform folks have openly discussed their move toward new features and market niches as the editing landscape changes. Would be nice to hear an update from the Cineform shop.

While I get that when something is broken it should be fixed, and if something is advertised it should be delivered etc but have you guys seen the tech sneek peek for CS5?

Add to that the word is CS5 will ship April this year...basically makes cineforms RTE obsolete

The RTE is of minimal importance to me. I need to be able to trim and archive projects. The CS4 Project Manager will not include CFHD files as part of the trimming function.

So far as CS5, the Mercury feature is exciting, but a rewrite for 64-bit operation has me hopeful for better stability. CS4 made a good step in that direction when installed on a 64-bit os with ample RAM.

Although the demo of the CS5 Mercury Engine is quite impressive, keep in mind all the problems some of us have had with CS4. Now, further consider that Sony Vegas Pro has had a 64 bit version for two versions now (8 and 9) and it is still far more unstable than its 32 bit sibling. One of the reasons could be, that Vegas is not a full 64 bit product. It relies on codecs and filters that still use 32 bit architecture and Vegas uses a surrogate program to allow these legacy items to communicate with the 64 bit parent.

If CS5 is pure 64 bit, it means that all the built-in codecs that the CS4 version utilizes will also have to be 100% 64 bit. If this is the route that Adobe takes, the stability should be vastly improved. But if not, I suspect that CS5 will not be any more stable than CS4 and worse, with all the new coding for 64 bit, it could be even more buggy. Then, throw in the Mercury Engine and we may have a real situation. I look forward to hearing from the CS5 "early adopters", because I won't be one of them.

I'm with you Jay I will not be one of the "early adopters" either, on the CS5, I've been this on the CS4.

Well said Jay.

If history repeats, it will be a CS4 system with a fully functional Cineform integration that will be the envy of CS5. I'd love to be wrong.

There's no downside to building a system that can handle all that CS5 promises (Nvidia CUDA Video Card, 12gb RAM, etc).... aside from the cost. Such a system would certainly host CS4 nicely. CS4 is very stable on my Win7 Pro/64-bit even though I am only running 4gb of RAM.

The weak link of CS4, in terms of both productivity and workflow (notwithstanding set up of multiple renders) is the Media Encoder. But that's for another thread.

I couldn't agree more.
What's it been? More than a year probably, and finally my Vista 64, 12 GB CS4.xx is running like a dream. Playing well with CF, EX1, AVCHD- stable, no more drama, no more grinding of teeth, rending of garments...
I will probably wait until just before CS6 is announced before even thinking about trading up to CS5/Win 7

Adobe should reward us for having put up with all the bugs by giving us free upgrades.

I couldn't agree more.
What's it been? More than a year probably, and finally my Vista 64, 12 GB CS4.xx is running like a dream. Playing well with CF, EX1, AVCHD- stable, no more drama, no more grinding of teeth, rending of garments...
I will probably wait until just before CS6 is announced before even thinking about trading up to CS5/Win 7

Common Robert, you like blood...you'll be first in line to CS5, you don't fool me! And that upgrade to Win 7 for you is a no-brainer.

Hey, my clean upgrade (yes, you can do it!) to Win 7 x64 went well and I'm flying now with CS3, nice, clean, fast, and stable. Ahhhhh...

That CS5 upgrade either better be free (or VERY cheap) or I wouldn't waste my time with it. Cost of CS4 was way too much, for way too little.

CS4 makes me cry:-(

It surprises me that Marty and I seem to be the only squeaky wheels about the lack of project trimming - for me this is *way* more vexing than the missing RTE. Does everyone else just keep buying bigger hard drives?

Someone will be working on the project trimming missing functionality next week.

Thanks for the update David.

You're gonna really miss us when this all gets sorted out.

Seems the realtime engine will not be a reality - I am sure Adobe is responsible for this - something has changed. I know Cineform has probably put a lot of work and money into this to no avail. I also purchased a MX02 mini thinking matrox was going to work with cineform, but seems matrox will not cooperate (I emailed Matrox multiple times, posted on their forms - they just don't even bother to respond) so I am selling it on ebay. There is something changing in the industry. I really appreciate the work Cineform has put into firstlight and thier Codecs. I have reverted back to edius, and use first light to work on the Video as needed and then convert it to Canopus HQ. Works great and I have realtime output. But I do hope I am wrong about the Adobe thing - I would love to use it.

Marty posted a link to an Adobe blog about the Mercury playback engine. I meant to leave a temporary redirect link to that thread when I moved it, but must have done it wrong. We'd like to keep each of these topics within its own "home." Here's a link to the Mercury thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/attend-world-premiere/469617-cs5-x64-mercury-playback-engine.html#post1473457

It surprises me that Marty and I seem to be the only squeaky wheels about the lack of project trimming - for me this is *way* more vexing than the missing RTE. Does everyone else just keep buying bigger hard drives?

Ahh...yeah. We back up everything on 1TB drives. Just back up all of your source footage, your project files, and you final exports. No need to trim the project. That just creates a bunch of files that are much harder to manage. At 7-10 cents a GB, hard drives are the cheapest storage medium, even cheaper than your original source tapes.

Given the choice I could forego the project trimmer forever in favor of SDI I/O in CS4.

Just back up all of your source footage, your project files, and you final exports. No need to trim the project. That just creates a bunch of files that are much harder to manage.

You must shoot with a higher success ratio that I do to want to keep ALL your transcoded CFHD footage. (My source files are AVCHD and are always retained in full).

Mike's way is kinda the same conclusion we came too. Just back to big HDDs and press on. Forget the trimming. Everyday that is becoming more of a reality as the drives get bigger, faster, and cheaper.

We just mirror drives to make life easier (using MirrorFolder). When we're done, we copy the mirrored drive (for backup security), take them out for storage, and stick in new drives. Faster, easier and really not much more expensive. Trimming can also be a pain when you suddenly find yourself needing to change something in the middle and have to go after all the files.

I do something similar, but for different reasons: with four-cam multicam edits of stage shows, we use close to 100% of the captured footage anyhow, so no real "trimming" actually occurs and we don't save any space. So the whole project folder gets backed up and archived to external drives.

The nice thing about project manager though, whether you trim or just collect files together, is that it does make it easy to bring everything into one place for simple archiving.

I guess it depends on the workflow. We got in the habit of including everything in a certain file structure (fairly complex), for our 5 person workflows. That way we're all on the same page and can usually find things fairly easily...something that can turn pretty difficult with thousands of elements in play.

Not perfect for sure, but when we upgrade to a better NAS system a friend has ready for us, it should be even easier. Multi-cam, multi-project, multi-language, multi-target is no fun when you get disorganized and start to lose things!

In a better funded world, we'd be using another workflow, certainly not Premiere...since it's just not designed for workgroups. Who knows if they'll change any of that in CS5?

I am so praying CS5 and the new rt engine is going to solve all these niggly issues that keep us all awake to the wee hours in a "ready to go postal" state. I don't know how many times I have gone over the FCP senario or maybe Avid. First light really rocks and the cineform lossless codec is superb, perhaps we will end up with a solution that works as advertised in the end.