Those who need more power for video and movie applications can equip their Mac Pro with the so-called Afterburner card ex works or later on. The 2500 euro system was developed by Apple according to own data, "to revolutionize the workflow of professional users in the film and video industry". Currently, however, the module only accelerates the ProRes and ProRes RAW video codecs in Final Cut Pro X, QuickTime Player X and supported applications from a few other providers. Kunftig is now expected to add the Adobe oko system: Integration with Premiere Pro is in the works.
Beta testers were already allowed to try it
This was announced by Adobe itself in its community. In beta versions of Premiere Pro (14.3.0 or newer) the functionality is already in place and can be tried out. Currently the decoding of ProRes 4444 and 422 is accelerated with Afterburner, ProRes Raw however not yet. Adobe had only recently begun to support this format; accordingly, Afterburner support had yet to follow.
Everything on the fly
Afterburner can play back up to six 8K ProRes RAW streams or 23 4K ProRes RAW streams, according to Apple – tested with a 28-core Mac Pro with lots of memory, 4 TByte SSD, and dual AMD Radeon Pro Vega IIs. More realistic for more affordable Mac Pro configurations is playback of up to three 8K or twelve 4K streams. In order for Premiere Pro to use the Afterburner card, Metal must be selected as a renderer – both in After Effects and in Media Encoder and Permiere Pro itself.
However, according to Adobe, this is already the default in the beta. Currently, there is no direct way to track the usage of the Afterburner card in Premiere Pro. Accordingly, Adobe is asking its beta testers to post their experiences using ProRes 422 or 4444 workflows on the forum.