ADOBE PREMIERE PRO

Talking specifics

NOW THE “WHAT” has been covered, it’s time to get down to the “why.” This system’s sole purpose is to output 4K video from Adobe’s Premiere Pro CC editing software.

We intend to record two or three videos once a week, then schedule them to upload online over a period of time, via either our Facebook page or YouTube, producing anything from teaser system build shoots, to timelapsed content, quick and dirty unboxings, and more. Depending on how that goes, we’ll begin to push for more content to go up, eventually up to one or two videos a day.

Premiere Pro is our go-to video-editing software for a number of reasons. Most notably due to its ability to utilize desktop-based hardware on Windows. Apple’s Final Cut Pro is more efficient at rendering 4K, but for color correction and ease of use, Prem is the best for the job.

Traditionally, Premiere Pro thrived on CPU power. It wasn’t until CS5 that it advanced to 64-bit, to take advantage of more than 4GB of DDR, and finally introduced CUDA and OpenCL support, to better take advantage of GPUs to render content faster and more efficiently.

CUDA is a language that makes the GPU accessible to the programer in a variety of applications. In Adobe’s case, that’s the Mercury Playback Engine, which lends itself to faster parallel processing computations, faster renders, color correction, higher quality scaling, and more. For us, the best GPU for the job is the GTX 1080 Ti— its mass of memory and the phenomenal number of CUDA cores makes it a surefire bet for improving render times.

And, finally, there’s the scratch disks. Premiere allocates a unique scratch disk for each and every project you work on. In short, this is an area of disk space where the Creative Cloud app stores temporary media files while you work. You can choose and allocate exactly where this is in the Settings tab, including the scratch disk’s size. Setting it to a large chunk of PCIe storage should help decrease both in-app render previews and the final output render times significantly, when compared to storing your scratch disk on a traditional HDD.