Here's a video I produced for OnlineVideo.net on using Premiere Pro's Ultra Key and Garbage Matte. It's an intro- to mid-level video that applies the effect on three videos of varying complexity. The good news? One video is of a (fully clothed) lovely dancing lady. The bad news? The lady's face is not showing (those pesky permission issues) and the other videos are of me.

All joking aside, if you've never used Premiere Pro's Ultra key and you plan to do so in the near term, the tutorial is worth a look.

Depending upon the project type, rendering with GPU-acceleration in Creative Suite 5.5 can reduce rendering time by up to 92% over CPU-only rendering. Since NVIDIA's CUDA technology is the only GPU that currently accelerates rendering in the Adobe Media Encoder and Premiere Pro, buying a notebook without NVIDIA hardware for CS5.5 production is a huge mistake.

If you're in the market for such a notebook, the HP 8760w is a dream machine that performs as well or better than a single CPU desktop workstation. If you need an external eSATA drive for production work, the Akitio Taurus Mini Super-S LCM should be on your short list.

Suppose you’ve been running Adobe CS5.5 without an NVIDIA graphics card. You’ve heard about the benefits of GPU acceleration with the Mercury Playback Engine and you’re wondering how much time an NVIDIA card could save you. Or you’re buying a new system and you’re wondering whether to buy a dual-CPU system with an inexpensive graphics card or a single CPU system with a high-end card. Or you’ve got an NVIDIA card and you’re wondering whether a higher-end NVIDIA card will deliver substantial time savings. Well, if any of these cases apply to you, you’ve come to the right place.

This article is the second of a series on configuring your Windows workstations for producing with Adobe CS 5.5. The focus of this particular article is the optimal RAM configuration for both a single CPU and dual CPU system for producing with Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder.

As an overview, I tested with two similarly configured systems from HP, who sponsored this testing, one with a 2.67 GHz 4-core CPU (an HP Z400), the other with two 2.67 GHz 4-core CPUs (an HP Z600). Both systems used the same graphics card, an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800. I ran multiple tests, encoding sequences created from different camera formats, from DV to Red, into multiple outputs, from MPEG-2 for DVD to H.264 for YouTube and Blu-ray. I ran the tests with three different RAM configurations, 6 GB, 12 GB and 24 GB.

As I explore in the main article, except in one or two discrete cases, I didn't see a whole lot of performance difference in the results.

This article is the first of a series on configuring your Windows workstation for producing with Adobe CS 5.5. The focus of this particular article is buying a single CPU vs. dual CPU system for producing with Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder. I’ll also cover whether it makes sense to enable or disable HTT (hyper-threaded technology) when available on your workstation.

As an overview, I tested with two similarly configured systems from HP, one with a 2.67 GHz 4-core CPU (an HP Z400), the other with two 2.67 GHz 4-core CPUs (an HP Z600). I ran multiple tests, encoding sequences created from different camera formats, from DV to Red, into multiple outputs, from MPEG-2 for DVD to H.264 for YouTube and Blu-ray. I ran the first series of tests in dedicated mode, with nothing else happening on the computer. Then I ran a second series of tests with Adobe Encore rendering a very long file to H.264 Blu-ray format.

Click over to the main story for all the gory details.