Just got around to trying the Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 trial. This version finally extends their "Mercury Playback Engine" to include some notebook CUDA processors, including the Quadro 2000M. The results with just a single test encoding are pretty impressive. The encoding time dropped from 44:53 to 17:22... not 1/3 the time but significantly better than 1/2. (It might even have been better, except I neglected to set the computer to "Maximum Performance" until the CS5.5 encoding was most of the way through pre-processing the audio.)

The source video is standard definition AVI files from Mini-DV rendered down to 320x240 15fps Flash video (On 2 VP6) with both "Maximum Render Quality" and "Frame Blending" turned on. The video is nothing fancy... a talking head with a few cards overlaid at the beginning and end. The CUDA-enhanced "Fast Color Corrector" is applied to the entire track to compensate for the room lighting.

CPU utilization was about 100% of all 8 cores, usually at about 116% clock speed (i7-2820QM). Files are on a eSATA HDD which doesn't seem to have been a bottleneck.

These renders used to take my previous computer (T61p) about 8x real-time; to see it drop to faster than real-time is quite remarkable. Not sure it's really worth a $500+ ugpgrade from CS5 (Master Collection) for me (I render only about 30h of video in a year), but it's tempting.

It's a tough decision. When did you buy the last version? If it's just few months ago I would recommend you to hold off.

It also depends on your work "season". Meaning, if summer is the time when you need it most, it may be worth spending the extra. Otherwise, just wait for the next version, which will probably release in 6 months or so, and spend on that instead.

I am planning to purchase a video editing tool. But CS is so expansive! What are the other alternatives?

Udvranto,

I don't really mean to start a video editing thread... just wanted to post a tidbit that might help someone decide between the two GPU options on the W520. It's possible Adobe might push the Mercury Engine support back to the 1000M at some point, but I honestly wasn't expecting them to have included the 2000M. That they did -- and that it made so much of a difference -- was a pleasant surprise I thought worth sharing.

But to answer your questions... when Keith Combs wrote his mini-review of the W520, he mentioned using Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 10. I'm not sure if that's CUDA-accelerated. I also found a NVIDIA CUDA video editing round-up article over here, but haven't read it yet. Looking at their conclusions, all of these products are vastly less expensive than Adobe's stuff.

For me, I can finish this year's batch of videos on the 30-day trial, so despite having purchased CS5 as soon as it was released (about a year ago), I will hold off on upgrading. (The improved eBook workflow of InDesign CS5.5 is attractive too, so we'll see how long I do wait.)