Premiere CS5 on Z

Hi,

I found a review (posted just below my words) that says the original Sony drivers won't allow hardware work in the video cards in Adobe Premiere CS5, although the Nvidia card supports it.

I had a Z before (first gen, sold it later on) and one of the problems I had were the drivers (and the time Sony took to switch to Win7 drivers). Now I have an Apple MBP.

How is it now ? I plan on buying a Sony Z but I do some video editing in Premiere CS5 and I need the hardware support from Sony. Or from some after-market drivers. Should I wait for the Sandy Bridge version? Will it come out any time soon? How fast is Sony upgrading the Z after Intel official launches the platform?

I saw a few threads around about Win 7 64b and custom drivers, but it was impossible to read all the 233 pages in just one thread .. Hopefully someone can just tell me, sorry but can't read that much

Thank you in advance!

Purely from a hardware point of view, the new Z Series Laptops are absolutely top notch.
All of that effort is pretty much worthless however in light of ancient graphics drivers. The hardware is capable of hardware acceleration for flash videos, professional software such as Adobe CS5 and APIs like OpenCL. Because Sony refuses to release up-to-date drivers however, none of these features are avaiable to VAIO customers.
So despite the great hardware, I cannot recommend it.

 

I try to keep short and listing the facts only since I run the CUDA accelerated mode in Premiere Pro CS5 with my Z11:

- Hardware accelerated mode makes rendering effects multiple times faster than software rendered. You can slide several effects into your movie and you can render and preview in realtime.
- Any GPU with less than 768MB video RAM will not run Prem CS5 in Mercury Hardware mode since CUDA doesnt work well then (I don't know how this is on MacBook (Pro)'s)
- Those are the official requirements: system requirements | Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 but with a simple patch done in 1 minute, the Z's GF330m will run with it
- Official Sony drivers do only provide very old CUDA support so you need to install one of the latest community drivers (which work great for me in any regard, I'm using thomaskc.dk's 263.00 drivers)
- If you want to use the accelerated mode on your Z, you need to boot in speed mode since after returning back into speed from stamina, CUDA isn't loaded anymore. Maybe there will be a patch someday, I am convinced there will be.
- There are some rumors that the successor of the Z won't have a nvidia GPU anymore - if it comes out to be true, you won't be able to use mercury engine on that.

I am absolutely happy with the drivers and PP CS5 on my Z. IMO, the current Z having a capable geforce chip is a big plus. Working in it is absolutely enjoyable since it is VERY fast. I dont want to miss it anymore.