The Adobe® Mercury Playback Engine in Adobe Premiere® Pro CS6 software delivers stunning performance and stability on both workstations and laptops. GPU accelerated, 64 bit, and optimized for today's blazingly fast multicore CPUs, and now third-party hardware, the Mercury Playback Engine provides an amazingly fluid, real-time editing experience.

The joy of creative play

Be creative without worrying about the ramifications of additional effects and high-resolution content. Say goodbye to costly delays waiting for intermediate renders. Combine P2, XDCAM, RED, ARRIRAW, Canon XF, DSLR, and DV footage on the timeline, and play with the look and flow at full frame rate.

With the Uninterrupted Playback feature, the Mercury Playback Engine supports real-time effects adjustments during playback. Imagine resizing panels to adjust your workspace, adjusting the parameters of the Three-Way Color Corrector, or adding motion effects to achieve exactly the look you want — all in real time while your footage is playing. With configurations capable of supporting more than nine simultaneous layers and dozens of effects, the Mercury Playback Engine makes every production more creative and efficient.

Enhanced Mercury Playback Engine

Get amazing performance on both desktops and laptops (Windows® and Mac OS). Natively 64 bit and optimized for modern CPUs, the Mercury Playback Engine delivers astounding performance with or without GPU acceleration. Open projects faster, scrub through HD and higher resolution footage more fluidly, and play back complex long-format and effects-heavy projects more reliably.

Expanded third-party I/O hardware support

Experience better playback performance than ever before thanks to Adobe Mercury Transmit, which gives Adobe I/O hardware partners, such as AJA, Blackmagic Design, Bluefish444, Matrox, and MOTU, direct access to the Mercury Playback Engine. Get full-screen playback on external monitors, while maintaining all the real-time performance benefits of the Mercury Playback Engine.

Workflows that work and flow

Put two-hour, thousand-clip projects together as easily as a high-impact trailer with the Mercury Playback Engine:

● Work in real time on complex timelines and long-form projects with thousands of clips — whether your project is SD, HD, 2K, 4K, 5K, or beyond.
● Open very large projects faster.
● Mix and match key formats such as P2, XDCAM, RED, ARRIRAW, Canon XF, and DSLR camera footage freely in the timeline, without intermediate rendering.
● Experiment with multiple color corrections and effects and see results in real time, even on complex timelines, during playback.
● Use real-time keying on multiple clips at all resolutions using the incredible Ultra® keyer.

Real-time effects with GPU acceleration

Take advantage of the ability of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, which requires a 64-bit operating system, to work hand in hand with NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology as well as AMD OpenCL technology on certain Apple MacBook Pro configurations. The Mercury Playback Engine uses NVIDIA GPU cards to provide a GPU-accelerated 32-bit color pipeline, and most popular effects have been rewritten to run on it — for example, effects like color correction, the Ultra keyer, and motion control all run in real time.

Extreme performance

Enjoy support for NVIDIA® Maximus™ dual-GPU configurations, bringing extreme performance for tackling the most demanding projects. NVIDIA Maximus powered workstations deliver faster effects and more fluid Adobe Premiere Pro workflows than ever before. These innovative workstations allow Adobe Premiere Pro to harness not only the graphics capability of Quadro GPUs, but also the tremendous parallel processing power of Tesla GPUs. This gives you the power to achieve greater levels of interactivity, explore new ideas, and see results in less time — all at your desktop.

GPU acceleration on MacBook Pro

On MacBook Pro computers with OSX 10.7.x with minimum 1GB VRAM, benefit from support in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 for GPU-accelerated OpenCL-based AMD Radeon HD 6750M and 6770M cards, bringing mobile workflows to Mac users. AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processors with 512MB of GDDR5 memory are available on 2.2GHz-configuration Apple MacBook Pro computers. AMD Radeon HD 6770M graphics processors with 1GB of GDDR5 memory are available on 2.4GHz-configuration Apple MacBook Pro computers.

Learn more about the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine and NVIDIA GPU technology ›

Optimization for modern CPUs

Even without a Mercury Playback Engine–supported GPU, get outstanding performance in Adobe Premiere Pro in software-only mode, thanks to its native 64-bit support and CPU optimizations.

How to optimize Production Premium for high-performance workflows

Read the white paper

Check out the results from an independent benchmarking study on the power of Production Premium.

Read about new efficiencies

Visit our forums for deeper technical information and frequently asked questions about the Mercury Playback Engine.

Find a workstation to fit your needs

Intel offers a tool that recommends the best workstation configuration for you and your production workflow.

Learn more ›

Accelerated rendering

Reduce the time required to deliver content to your clients. The Mercury Playback Engine doesn't just deliver blazingly fast performance and a fluid editing experience, but by more optimally using your entire system performance, it also accelerates output.

The Mercury Playback Engine brings performance gains to all the GPUs supported today in Adobe Creative Suite® 6 software. If you're upgrading your system and want to get the most out of your configuration, the following graphics cards offer significant additional acceleration:

For more information about CUDA processing and the Mercury Playback Engine in general, see CUDA, Mercury Playback Engine, and Adobe Premiere Pro.

NVIDIA graphics card performance gains

Use a qualified NVIDIA graphics card for significantly faster performance over software-only encoding. NVIDIA measured the performance of several of their graphics cards using four different sequences. GPU-accelerated effects such as Warp Stablizer, Adjustment Layers, the revamped Three-Way Color Corrector, RGB curves, scaling, keyframed opacity, and more were applied to single and multiple layers of HD video. Impressive results were achieved using a preliminary version of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.

Compared with CPU-only rendering using a quad-core Intel® i7 930 processor running at 2.8GHz, installing an entry-level NVIDIA Quadro 2000 improves performance by more than six times. A Quadro 5000 yields a better than eight times performance boost, while a top-of-the-line Maximus system powered by a Quadro 6000 and Tesla C2075 is over nine times faster. Results will vary depending on your specific projects and hardware configuration, but these preliminary results give an indication of the benefits of GPU-accelerated effects processing in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.

* When paired with a Quadro card as part of NVIDIA Maximus configured system.