Adobe Hardware Performance White Paper Optimizing Hardware Systems for Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC, After Effects® CC, SpeedGrade™ CC, and Photoshop® CC The artist’s guide to configuring or upgrading a computer to get the most out of these cornerstone video software applications. Today’s digital 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 CC, After Effects CC, SpeedGrade CC, and Photoshop CC 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 explore this in three stages: • Hardware: Explain the major hardware components of a computer system, and their role in the overall performance of a video workstation. • Software: Discuss the hardware demands of Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, SpeedGrade, and Photoshop, highlighting which functions will benefit the most from specific hardware improvements. • Making Choices: Summarize this 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: the Central Processing Unit, Graphics Processing Unit, Random Access Memory, and Storage Devices. 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. To provide an overview, the accompanying illustration shows how these major areas are interconnected. 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 is “hyper-threading.” Using this technology, a single physical processor core may appear as two virtual cores to the Central operating system and the software that runs under it. Processing Unit These are helpful when you have one instance of software that can take advantage of multiple processors Random Graphics Storage (a capability known as “multithreading”); however, these Access Processing Devices Memory Unit virtual cores are not used when multiple instances of software are each looking for their own processor to run Input/Output on. This is a subject we will discuss in more depth in the Hardware 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 to optimize your software, operating system, and—perhaps most importantly—how you use them. One useful resource is this Adobe blog post on optimizing performance in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects (tinyurl.com/AdobePWP-02). In addition to optimizing your hardware, some of the simplest actions you can take to save you time in the long run are using auto save or constantly saving your project to incremental version numbers, making it easier...

For maximum performance, video cards must have a high-speed connection to your CPU. In workstation-style computers, this is governed by the speed of the physical slot the card is inserted into. If you are installing your own graphics card, make sure you put it in a slot marked “16x” or “16 lane”—not a smaller number like 8x or 4x, which transfer data at slower speeds. Random Access Memory (RAM):  This is the hub of your computer system. For a program to be executed or an image to be manipulated, a copy of it must be held in your computer’s memory. The amount available is often stated as gigabytes...

sources and output, especially for Adobe Premiere Pro), and one for your temporary storage caches. Some laptop users also replace their optical drive with a second drive—usually an SSD. This particularly helps overcome the problem of a single drive seeking back and forth to deliver different pieces of requested data. An alternate solution is to connect multiple drives together into a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives (RAID), which delivers maximum performance. RAID Level 0 system is the simplest, delivering higher performance with no additional functionality. A RAID Level 1 copies the same...

Many users enjoy the flexibility and freedom of using laptop computers or mobile workstations. Previously, laptop computers did not have the performance as desktop systems, but that has been changing. For example, here are configuration options for the Dell Precision mobile workstation: Dell Precision™ M6800 Workstation • CPU: 4 physical cores; clock rates up to 3.0 GHz • GPU: May be pre-ordered from Dell with an NVIDIA Quadro K5100M, K4100M, K3100M, or AMD Firepro M6100 • R AM: Up to 32GB of memory • Storage: Up to three internal 2.5” internal drive bays, optional SSD, mSATA solid state storage...