Sunday, June 12, 2011

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 on the Dell Precision M4600

I've been testing my Dell Precision M4600 with the Premiere Pro CS5.5 trial version. I love it.

My M4600 came  with a NVIDIA  Quadro 2000M and 8GB of RAM. I put in two HD uncompressed clips back to back and played it out. It played smoothly even on the highest quality at 100% size. So the new Mercury Playback Engine was working well. It was just like the demo videos on the Adobe websites. Only when I put color correction into the clip did it start to jerk a little, however on 1/2 quality it played smoothly.

I exported one of the clips to After Effects to use the warp stabilizer. It took about 3-5 mins for the background render to complete for a 1 min clip. At the same time I could continue editing in Premiere Pro. That is going to save so much time in the future.

While it's still amazing, I think the Quadro 2000M is just scratching the surface and meets only the minimum requirement for the full capabilities of the CS5.5. To really see its full capabilities and enjoy fast unrendered workflow, the Dell Precision M5600 is the machine to go for. the M5600 will have the higher end NVIDIA Quadro 5010M cards on it. However, this is way out of my budget.

For me, what I have now is good enough. While I only have 8GB RAM and it's already doing well. In future, if I am going to be doing more effects and rendering, I would upgrade to 16GB RAM.

Also, I've been playing Shogun 2 on it at the highest setting. It plays smoothly and looks great.

6 comments:

rob macfarlane said...

Greetings! - I'm also running Adobe premiere pro cs5.5 on my m4600, and I did get the quad core processor (albeit without the fancy upgraded nvidia graphics card). So far it's been working great.

I've also added an external g-raid mini 1TB hard disk via the external eSATA port on the back of the machine (this drive holds the source video), and am just now installing an external blu ray burner/player (from The Video Guys in new york) via an ExpressCard eSATA interface... so I was searching for 'how to remove expresscard' from the m4600 and that's what brought me to your blog.

if you'd like to converse further regarding using the machine, please drop me a line.

I'm rob, in Alameda, California.

Hope your machine is working well for you.

- rob, tbeetle@pacbell.net

Travis said...

Hello, I also am very impressed with the performance of the m4600, as I have a very similar build, i7 Quad, Quadro 2000m, 8gb ram and the IPS display.

The only thing that I don't like is that Premiere Pro, switches from windows Aero to windows basic on load.

Are you experiencing the same behavior?

luxen said...

Hi Travis, I haven't noticed this as it's not a big deal for me. Does it affect your performance and loading speed?

With the latest Premiere Pro 5.5.1 and latest Nvidia drivers from the Nvidia website, loading is faster for me.

Also, if you use the new drivers, you have to go to NVIDIA Control Panel and set it to "Enable Video Editing Mode". I found that performance is better.

Figit090 said...

I'm a bit confused when you mention the m5600 and specs for it...are you guessing by the next line of compatible cards or am I missing something?

luxen said...

Figit090 to check the specs of the M5600, just drop by the Dell website. It'll give you all the info you want. Definitely, more reliable than what I have.

Figit090 said...

Hi Luxen- either I'm confused, don't see the page, or there's a typo somewhere on here because I see the m4600 and the m6600, the 15 and 17in precision mobile workstations...but you have the m4600 so my only guess is you're looking at the larger m6600 model??

If there is in fact a m5600 that not even google finds, please link me to it! :)