Adobe Hardware Performance White Paper
Optimizing Hardware Systems for
Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS6, After Effects® CS6,
SpeedGrade!" CS6, and Photoshop® Extended CS6
The artist s guide to configuring or upgrading a computer to get the most out of these cornerstone video software applications.
Today s digital video and cinema content creators demand more performance from their systems
especially as they take on an ever-widening array of jobs at ever-larger media sizes. However, not all editors, colorists, and graphic artists are also computer hardware specialists. This document will discuss how you a user of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, After Effects CS6, SpeedGrade CS6, and Photoshop
Extended CS6 software can analyze your needs based on the type of work you do. With this information, you can then either choose a new computer system or enhance an existing one with simple add-in components that will deliver optimal performance for your unique set of requirements. The goal is to balance the components of your system to deliver the performance your specific tasks require.
This allows you to focus on your own creativity while efficiently delivering what your client needs.
We will unravel this challenge in three stages:
" Explain the major hardware components of a computer system, and their role in the overall performance of a video workstation.
" Discuss the unique hardware demands of Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, SpeedGrade, and
Photoshop, highlighting which functions will benefit the most from specific hardware improvements.
" Summarize the above information into hardware recommendations for common tasks.
The Major Hardware Components
We will be covering four major areas of hardware when we discuss optimizing your system s performance.
If you are already well versed in the subject of computer hardware, you may skip straight to the section
Identifying Performance Bottlenecks. If you are more of an artist than a computer wizard, it will be helpful to have an understanding of these major components so that you can feel confident making decisions about configuring the right computer system for your needs.
Central Processing Unit (CPU): This is the brain of your computer.
Computers may have one or more CPU chips, and each chip may have multiple cores or processing units embedded in a physical chip. Generally, more physical cores means more processing power,
which means software runs faster although some software now uses the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) as much as the CPU; more on that below.
Another issue you will hear mentioned alongside the number of physical cores available is hyper-threading. Using this technology, a single physical processor core may appear as two virtual cores to the operating system and the software that runs under it. These are helpful when you have one instance of software that can take advantage of multiple processors
(a capability known as multithreading ); however, these virtual cores are not used when multiple instances of software are each looking for their own processor to run on. This is a subject we will discuss in more depth in the section on After Effects and multiprocessing.
Other Considerations
Although this document is focused on configuring your hardware for optimal performance, there are many things you can do as a user
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