Some software upgrades are about flashy new interfaces and sexy new features, and others have more to do with supercharging the engine under the hood in order to boost the overall performance. This past year, video editing tools have been working on the flashy side with support for working with 3D video, but the real focus has continued to be on the machinery - taking advantage of today's 64-bit architectures to work efficiently with large clips in memory, combined with GPU (graphics processing unit) hardware to significantly speed up video processing.

We've seen this trend in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, with the GPU-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine introduced last year, and with the application available only for 64-bit systems. Similarly, Vegas Pro 10 from Sony Creative Software was released last year with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and with GPU acceleration for rendering to AVC format.

Now Sony has released Vegas Pro 11, with full-up GPU acceleration for video processing, effects, and rendering, for speed ups across editing, playback, and output. Besides the under-the-hood improvements, the new Vegas also enhances editing with features including sync link, adds new technology including advanced video stabilization, and provides deeper support for editing 3D material including 3D Titler Pro.

GPU Acceleration

Integrating GPU acceleration into video editing software involves several trade-offs, balancing the number of video processing operations that are accelerated, the level of optimization for each effect, and the range of GPU processors and board hardware versions supported - all across different manufacturers, widely varying numbers of processors and associated on-board memory, and different functions available for acceleration.

Adobe's answer for Premiere Pro was to optimize for the NVIDIA line of graphics cards, taking advantage of the CUDA programming interface. With Vegas Pro 11, Sony has taken the approach of using the OpenCL (Open Computing Language) standard for parallel programming, to support a variety of GPU cards from both NVIDIA and AMD, with at least 512 MB of GPU memory. Sony's benchmarks show three to four times improvement in playback performance on mixed-format projects during editing compared to Vegas 10, and two to four times improvement in rendering the final output.

For video editing and playback, Sony reports that the Vegas 11 overhaul accelerates a substantial chunk of the built-in video processing, including crossfades, fades, alpha compositing, framerate resampling, time remapping, interlace processing, pan/crop, track motion, opacity, fade-to-color, and multicamera display. Plus it accelerates over 45 effects, transitions, generators and compositors -- with effects including gaussian blur, black and white, cookie cutter, bump map, mask generator, sepia, lens flare and chromakeyer, plus transitions such as cross effect, iris, and clock wipe.

Plug-Ins / Stabilization

Another aspect of the Vegas Pro 11 retrofit was rebuilding the underlying architecture for video effects plug-ins based on the Open Effects Association platform. This new suspension provides an enhanced interface to allow third-party developers to more easily develop cool new Vegas plug-ins to better smooth your ride.

Sony also uses this platform for built-in tools, including the new advanced video stabilization plug-in, with high-performance shocks to reduce the jittery or shaky video caused by handheld recorders. The plug-in analyzes the motion within a clip on all three camera axes, so you can build on the presets to independently control the precision for pan smoothing (left/right), tilt (up/down) and zoom. It also provides rolling-shutter correction for the JELL-O/skew/wobble effects caused by some CMOS camcorders.