Today, Elemental announced the release of Elemental Accelerator 2.2 for Mac, a major update to its GPU-accelerated video processing plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4. With release 2.2, Elemental Accelerator provides CS4 users on the Mac significantly faster transcode speeds through support for GPU-accelerated H.264 and MPEG-2 video decoding, processing and encoding. This release offers the same easy integration with Adobe Premiere® Pro® CS4 as Elemental Accelerator for Windows, while offering 2X-4X performance improvements and time savings over CPU-only encoding solutions.

What's new?

New features available in this release include:

Elemental is pleased to announce the release of Elemental Accelerator 2.2.1 for Windows, an important update to its GPU-accelerated video processing plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4. Release 2.2.1 contains bug fixes and updates as well as performance improvements that every Elemental Accelerator user will find essential.

Elemental is pleased to announce the release of Elemental Accelerator 2.2 for Windows, an important update to its GPU-accelerated video processing plug-in for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CS4. With the release of 2.2, Elemental Accelerator provides support for video encoding using multiple NVIDIA Quadro FX GPUs.  Multi-GPU functionality efficiently divides the encoding workload among all supported GPUs in a system, radically increasing overall export speed and performance. A multi-GPU implementation is well-suited to platforms with multiple PCI-E slots available to accommodate more than one NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics card, such as Z Series workstations from HP and ThinkStation workstations from Lenovo.
Supported multi-GPU configurations are:

•    2 x NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800
•    2 x NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800
•    2 x NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800

Although performance improvements will vary depending on GPU(s), video source and export settings, Elemental Accelerator provides a dramatic speed increase over the standard CPU-only encoder when leveraging multiple GPUs. In the following test case, encoding AVCHD 1080p source video to H.264 720p output can be performed nearly six times faster with Elemental Accelerator than with the standard encoder available with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Jeff Pulera of Safe Harbor features the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 with Elemental Accelerator in a recent product spotlight blog post. Jeff performed extensive benchmarking using Elemental Accelerator with the Quadro FX 3800 card, testing both H.264 and MPEG-2 encoding performance as well as scaling video for a variety of target applications and devices, including Blu-ray, DVD, YouTube and iPod. In most cases, Elemental Accelerator performed video encoding faster than real time and in all cases, Elemental Accelerator outperformed the standard CPU-only encoder. Click here to check out Jeff's comprehensive write-up and performance metrics and learn more about using Elemental Accelerator for fast GPU-based encoding from a video professional!

The first edition of NVIDIA's Adobe Community Newsletter is all about Elemental Accelerator! The newsletter describes the most up-to-date features and benefits of Elemental Accelerator, including recently released support for MPEG-2 encoding, and provides performance benchmarks, bundled pricing, an ROI case study and more. Click here to view the newsletter online and explore the information and resources NVIDIA has put together for video professionals!