DMN Interview, Part 2: Premiere Pro Premieres
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DMN: I did notice a marked increase in performance. Is that just one of the reasons why we're seeing that, because of this elimination of the RGB loop?
Townhill: It is one of many reasons why you're seeing that, yes. In the process of re-architecting the product, and I stress, the video engine has been completely re-written, we now support multithreading, hyperthreading, multiprocessor and SSE-2 optimizations. So a great deal of work has been done to make sure we that take full advantage of the host architecture PC on which it is running. What's really nice about this is that it becomes virtually infinitely scalable. So if you start on our minimum system requirement which is a P3 800, then you're going to run quarter-rez on the VGA screen only. If you keep upgrading the platform, and let's say you take it all the way to, at the time you're going to publish this article, I guess the best you could get would be a dual Xeon 3GHz environment, at that point you're looking at full-resolution DV, real time, to the VGA screen and out through the FireWire port. It's one of those questions where immediately almost everybody says, "What do I really need to get real time? What kind of level of performance do I need to buy to get real time?" And that's a very hard question to answer with any definition. Previous versions of Premiere -- it was easier -- we would say, "Oh, you need this." With the version of Premiere Pro that we've written now, we've deliberately written it to be scalable. So the more power you throw at your system, the more you're going to benefit from it. And it's a direct correlation, largely because of the hyperthreading and the SSE-2 optimizations that we've put into the application. It really, truly takes advantage of multiprocessing, it really, truly takes advantage of all the enhancements that Intel have made in the processing department -- so it's truly scalable.
DMN: Speaking of processors, there's a lot of talk now about 64-bit processors -- Opteron, Itanium 2 and the new G5 -- although we're not talking about the G5 with this application. Does Adobe plan to convert this application to 64-bit for these new processors?
Townhill: Absolutely, yes.
DMN: Do you think it'll make a difference in the performance? Does that matter?
Townhill: That's a hard question to answer. My suspicion is, of course, it will make a difference. As we've seen already, the difference between a P3 100 and dual Xeons is very noticeable, and if you go from 32-bit to 64-bit, then naturally as the speed increases, the performance of the application increases. So there's no doubt in my mind that as you move to a 64-bit architecture you're definitely going to see the benefit of that.
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DMN: Maybe for HD producers, that'll make an even bigger difference.
Townhill: Absolutely. What's interesting about HD is that it re-sets the video editing clock.
DMN: I noticed that, too.
Townhill: Ten years ago, we needed dedicated hardware, hard drives were expensive, video was big and fat, and it was difficult to move around, and we get to the point where -- here we are now -- you hardly need hardware any more, disk drives are cheap. All of a sudden, I'm into HD, and my video resolution is four times larger, I need terabytes of storage, and dedicated hardware to get this material in and out, and suddenly I feel like we're back in the 1990s again. HD is definitely a revolution in terms of picture quality, but it's definitely a step back in terms of how much I need to spend and how difficult it is to get video moving around again.
DMN: I guess when we talk about 64-bit, the obvious question is, what about Apple, and why didn't you guys author Premiere Pro for the Mac? Mac users might miss this -- this is going to be a great app.
Townhill: [Laughs] Part of me hopes that they do.
DMN: [Laughs] Is this a war between Adobe and Apple?
Townhill: No, I don't think it's a war, I don't believe it's a war. We're certainly not intending for anybody to interpret it as a war.
DMN: Is it business? Competition?
Townhill: It's a business decision, it's purely a business decision. There are several factors involved. Number 1, the majority of Premiere customers were already on the PC.
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