NVidia, Premiere Pro, CUDA
Next project: do something about all those hours of HD video footage that I collected over the years. they are all clips and all in full HD, 30 Mbps/second, recorded on my Olympus EP1. The problem with the EP1 is that it records in a relatively non standard format: 30 FPS motion jpeg and until a year ago (last time I looked) there weren't many programs that could handle it. I found that MainConcept has a good codec that would work with CS4, but the graphics performance of my system was too poor to allow for any interactive editing.
Enter CS5.5 stage left.
Enter Nvidia GTX 460 stage right.
Enter new quad core upgrade .... falling in from the top.
with CS5 its possible to use the 228 CUDA cores on the GTX460 (the card is from EVGA), albeit with some help (see this the excellent writeup on http://www.studio1productions.com/) . I've not enabled it yet (I only got the card a little while ago) but even without the hardware support from the GTX460 the difference with CS5 is very noticeable, I can move back and forward in the clip and apply transformations (color corrections) in real-time and the CPU is not maxed out like it was with my previous card a Nvidia 7600 (which, I checked, was 4 years old ... ahum)
update: I enabled the CUDA processing for Premiere Pro CS5 with the little app from studio1productions ... works like a charm and it has made the system even faster.
more later.