Thread: Adobe's Mercury playback engine is incredible!

I've experienced some problems with editing HD video in Premiere and After Effects CS4. The critical problem is that After Effects is choking on my source footage, which is Panasonic's 28 Mbps 1080 50p stuff. As a result, I've been unable to overlay any graphics onto my videos since switching to HD.

I downloaded the trial of CS5.5, which may fix the problem. I haven't yet had time to test this. But something else blew me away already:

Premiere CS4 can handle my 1080p video, but only just. If I add any slow-motion effects, or layer one video on top of another, I bring CS4 to its knees. Today I created a fantastic demo with two clips superimposed. I was expecting the editor to chug, but I wasn't expecting the footage to crash CS4 media encoder!

In desperation, I started my trial of CS5.5. The project now plays back silky-smooth in the editor, even with a large video window, and even with the "fancy" demo section. The difference is night and day. And it encodes just fine, and remarkably quickly.

...and that's without even having a "supported" graphics card or a super-fast PC. I thought they were hyping this Mercury playback engine, but the difference really is astounding.

...what's more, my initial test suggests that the After Effects issue is fixed in CS5.5.

Sounds very promising. Good to hear you found a solution. CS5 is the current version right? 5.5 a patch?

5.5 is not a patch; it's an upgrade. Adobe are treating it somewhat like a full release. Seems like a good way to squeeze even more money from their customers...

I believe some owners of 5 qualify for a free upgrade to 5.5, however.