Adobe Premiere Pro now supports Nvidia GPU acceleration

As Adobe relates, the 4:2:2 color format is a game changer for professional video editors. It provides twice as much color information as the typical 4:2:0 color formats while only increasing the raw file size by 30%. This results in some significant improvements.

1. Enhanced Color Accuracy: 4:2:2 doubles the amount of color information in video streams, giving editors more flexibility when color grading so they can perform more precise and nuanced adjustments during color correction.
2. Superior Keying: 4:2:2 is especially advantageous for chroma keying techniques like green screening. It enables cleaner and more accurate extraction of subjects from backgrounds, as well as sharper edges on small, detailed objects like hair.
3. Clearer Text: Text readability is a notorious problem when encoding. With 4:2:0, color frequently bleeds into text, making it hard to read. 4:2:2 makes text sharp and clear.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 50 Series GPU-equipped PCs and laptops now support 4:2:2 encode and decode in Adobe Premiere Pro, improving video editing as well as AI workflows.

4:2:2 adoption

The 4:2:2 format had not been widely adopted for two reasons.

4:2:2 cameras were very expensive and typically bought only by professionals. In the past two years, though, this has changed. Major manufacturers have released mass-market cameras for prices under $600. So, there's more of it about.

It can't be ignored though that 4:2:2 is a more complex encoding format that requires more compute power. This means that streams can stutter, making it impractical to use. Many editors choose to create proxies before editing these files, which takes a lot of time.

The GeForce RTX 50 Series adds hardware acceleration for 4:2:2 encode and decode, solving the compute problem. These GPUs accelerate 4:2:2 encoding by ten-fold and can decode 10 times as many 4K, 30 FPS streams per decoder. Adobe's support for 4:2:2 GPU decode now allows video editors to take full advantage of the new GPUs.

AI also boosted

As everyone is aware much of Nvidia's current success and sky high stock market valuation is down to its work in AI, so it's no surprise that the new GPUs also boost performance in this area too With Adobe having put a lot of effort in deploying AI assists into its software over the past couple of years, it's interesting to see how much the Nvidia cards can accelerate the processes in Premiere Pro.

According to the company, Media Intelligence benefits from the generational upgrades of GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, providing a 30% boost in performance on the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU compared to the GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU. And, with Apple Silicon often considered to be the benchmark for such things, Enhance Speech runs seven times faster on a GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU compared to the MacBook Pro M4 Max. Which is impressive...