One of the big performance boosters for CS5 was the complete rewriting of Premiere Pro's playback engine, now known as the Mercury Playback engine. This essentially allows the software to leverage higher end CUDA-based nVidia cards to enable Real-time playback of footage even when plugins, multiple layers, or the Ultra keyer have been applied. (To further speed up playback of extremely augmented footage, you can reduce the playback quality of the footage.) This is really an impressive setup and we spent a lot of time testing this feature on both our Quadro FX 4800 equipped desktop and our factory equipped Win 7 laptop. On our Quadro rig, most of the nasty red "unrendered" lines were replaced with yellow lines, which meant that it could play in real time (or near real time) without rendering.
For folks planning to get the nVidia cards that support this, this is a major benefit and likely justifies the entire upgrade to CS5 alone. With that said, there are currently only a small handful of nVidia cards that are supported, and most of these are more expensive. (Third party versions of the Quadro FX 4800 retail for $1500-$1700, for example.) The one issue besides video card costs I noted with the Mercury engine is that there isn't an option to easily render this yellow-line footage if you want to do so. For effects work, you often want to see a higher rez version of the playback and would be okay to just fully render that footage. However, other than manually shutting off the GPU assistance of your video card, that option isn't available at this time, which was frustrating.
While there are many benefits to the 64-bit version of After Effects and Premiere Pro, you will have to replace ALL of your 3rd Party plugins. Fortunately, some plugins, like Video Copilot's Optical Flares, make this upgrade free and timely.
The 64-bit conversion may have made it necessary to upgrade all your plugins, but your video editing can now go a lot faster now that it can address all the RAM on your x64 machine. Additionally, it's got a lot more optimization for multi-processor and multi-core machines, meaning things can be done more efficiently than before.
Another workflow improvement than I really liked is the fact that Premiere Pro will let you either export a single clip directly from the program or add multiple clips to Adobe Media Encoder's queue to render separately. (You may remember that the Adobe Media Encoder with its AE-style queue was part of the CS4 release. However, they completely did away with any ability to export a single file from within Premiere Pro with that release. It's cool to see that they've brought this back as an option so you have more control over your workflow.)
While there are a lot of good things in the performance section of Production Premium, there are some areas that need work. Currently the Meta Tag integration between OnLocation and Premiere Pro is a bit off. This is because the defaults for the meta tagging for OnLocation and Premiere Pro are completely different. As such, you can spend hours typing in all the meta data you want in OnLocation and import it into Premiere Pro, only to find that all the data is "gone." If you open all the Meta Data menus, you find that data, but it still isn't anywhere near as easy to read or organize as it was in OnLocation. This was very frustrating as we were working on the Depleted: Day 419 tests.
