Optimizing Hardware Systems for Adobe ® Premiere ® Pro CC, After Effects ® CC, SpeedGrade ? CC, and Photoshop ® CC0 pages

Adobe Hardware Performance White Paper

Optimizing Hardware Systems for
Adobe® Premiere® Pro CC, After Effects® CC,
SpeedGrade™ CC, and Photoshop® CC
The artist’s guide to configuring or upgrading a computer to get the most out of these
cornerstone video software applications.
Today’s digital content creators demand more performance from their systems—especially as they take
on an ever-widening array of jobs at ever-larger media sizes. However, not all editors, colorists, and
graphic artists are also computer hardware specialists. This document will discuss how you—a user of
Adobe Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC, SpeedGrade CC, and Photoshop CC software—can analyze
your needs based on the type of work you do. With this information, you can then either choose a new
computer system or enhance an existing one with simple add-in components that will deliver optimal
performance for your unique set of requirements. The goal is to balance the components of your system
to deliver the performance your specific tasks require. This allows you to focus on your own creativity
while efficiently delivering what your client needs.
We will explore this in three stages:
•tHardware: Explain the major hardware components of a computer system, and their role in the overall
performance of a video workstation.
•tSoftware: Discuss the hardware demands of Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, SpeedGrade, and
Photoshop, highlighting which functions will benefit the most from specific hardware improvements.
•t Making Choices: Summarize this information into hardware recommendations for common tasks.

The Major Hardware Components
We will be covering four major areas of hardware when we discuss optimizing your system’s performance:
the Central Processing Unit, Graphics Processing Unit, Random Access Memory, and Storage Devices.
If you are already well versed in the subject of computer hardware, you may skip straight to the section
Identifying Performance Bottlenecks. If you are more of an artist than a computer wizard, it will be helpful
to have an understanding of these major components so that you can feel confident making decisions
about configuring the right computer system for your needs. To provide an overview, the accompanying
illustration shows how these major areas are interconnected.
Central Processing Unit (CPU):  This is the brain of your computer. Computers may have one or more CPU
chips, and each chip may have multiple “cores” or processing units embedded in a physical chip. Generally,
more physical cores means more processing power, which means software runs faster—although some
software now uses the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) as much as the CPU; more on that below.
Another issue you will hear mentioned is “hyper-threading.” Using this technology, a single physical
processor core may appear as two virtual cores to the
Central
operating system and the software that runs under it.
Processing Unit
These are helpful when you have one instance of
software that can take advantage of multiple processors
Random
Graphics
Storage
(a capability known as “multithreading”); however, these
Access
Processing
Devices
Memory
Unit
virtual cores are not used when multiple instances of
software are each looking for their own processor to run
Input/Output
on. This is a subject we will discuss in more depth in the
Hardware
section on After Effects and multiprocessing.