NVIDIA Quadro K5000 Powers Switch to Adobe Edit Workflow for Stargate Studios

Stargate Studios is a global, award-winning production company specializing in virtual production and visual effects with offices in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Berlin, Vancouver, Toronto, Mumbai and Malta. Stargate’s 250 artists and supervisors deliver VFX for hit shows The Walking Dead, Haven, Grey’s Anatomy, Californication, Private Practice, Touch, and more.

Stargate’s in-house editorial team is in the process of transitioning from Final Cut Pro on MacPro machines to Adobe Premiere Pro, a decision made in part to standardize all creative teams on the PC platform. In order to benefit from the GPU-accelerated playback in Adobe Premiere Pro, Stargate editorial supervisor Anthony Safarik tapped NVIDIA’s new Quadro K5000 GPU based on NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture, the world’s fastest and most efficient GPU architecture, to give their workflow an unprecedented boost.

Challenge
When Stargate initially started transitioning their editors to PC workstations, they needed to devise systems that would meet the performance demands required to replace Final Cut Pro. One of the benefits of working in Final Cut Pro was the ability to generate temp effects in real time—with the downside being that everything had to be pre-rendered into ProRes, a time consuming process for Stargate’s editors.

“When we were looking to switch over from Macs to PCs in our editorial pipeline, we knew we had to find a solution that delivered the same real-time effects performance as Final Cut, but that cut out the time consuming step of pre-rendering into ProRes, which would take at least a full hour per 20-minute clip,” explains Safarik. “As VFX editors, we do a lot of temp effects like color correction, speed changes, and scale changes in order to give the compositors a strong starting point when we hand off our files. So being able to get a jump start on VFX during the editorial process is key for us.”

Solution
Working with NVIDIA Quadro K5000 cards in their Lenovo ThinkStation D30 workstations facilitated the workflow boost that enabled Stargate to transition their editing completely onto Adobe Premiere Pro.

Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere Pro leverages NVIDIA Quadro GPUs and NVIDIA CUDA parallel-computing architecture to deliver up to eight times faster performance for key features, including Uninterrupted Playback, Warp Stabilizer, Three-Way Color Corrector, and Multi-Cam Support. The GPU-accelerated Mercury Playback Engine also enables fluid playback of cutting-edge video formats including DSLR, RED 4, and 5K native footage.

“This was our first time working with a GPU-acceleration, and with the K5000 driving the Premiere Pro Mercury Playback Engine, the speed increases just blew our Final Cut performance completely out of the water.”

“We did a session for an episode of Californication where we were working in a logarithmic color space—and in the past when we did these sessions we would have to spend an hour upfront to encode to ProRes, apply the effect then spend another 20 minutes to render it out into linear color space for review. With the Quadro K5000 and Adobe Premiere Pro, we were able to eliminate an hour of upfront rendering and the extra 20-minutes of rendering the linear effect on top of that. That amounts to a substantial time savings when there’s a room of producers, directors and visual effects supervisors standing over your shoulder,” continued Safarik.

Impact
One recent example of Stargate’s new workflow in action was on a shot for Californication. “We were going over a crowd duplication scene, I didn’t have a lot of time so I just loaded the client shot directly into Premiere Pro, and with the Mercury Playback Engine running on the Quadro GPU, I was able to apply color correction and rendering instantly to examine different ways to pull off the shot. Being able to examine all the different options in person, in real time helps the client make confident decisions, and helps us produce better work,” said Safarik.

“It’s also a huge boost for us that everyone at Stargate is now on the same platform, working with the same file formats, and being able to leverage Adobe’s Dynamic Link to work seamlessly between Premiere Pro and After Effects. Adobe is streamlining our workflow, and the power boost that NVIDIA’s Quadro K5000 provided has been critical to our successful adoption of Premiere Pro,” concluded Safarik.

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