RTX Blackwell GPUs Accelerate Video Editing

4:2:2 cameras — capable of capturing double the color information compared with most standard cameras — are becoming widely available for consumers. At the same time, generative AI video models are rapidly increasing in functionality and quality, making new tools and workflows possible.

NVIDIA RTX GPUs based on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture include dedicated hardware to encode and decode 4:2:2 video, and come with fifth-generation Tensor Cores designed to accelerate AI and deep learning workloads.

GeForce RTX 50 Series and NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell Series are primed to meet this demand, powering generative AI, new AI features and state-of-the-art video editing workflows for quicker cuts and faster exports.

4:2:2 Goes Mainstream

4:2:2 10-bit compatible video cameras are on the rise.

These cameras, which were traditionally reserved for professional use due to their high cost, are becoming more cost-friendly, with major manufacturers offering them at prices under $600.

4:2:2 cameras can capture double the color information compared with standard 4:2:0 cameras while only increasing raw file sizes by 30%.

Standard cameras typically use 4:2:0 8-bit color compression, capable of capturing only a fraction of color information. While 4:2:0 is acceptable for video playback on browsers, professional video editors demand cameras that capture 4:2:2 color accuracy and fidelity, while keeping file sizes reasonable.

The downside of 4:2:2 is that the additional color information requires more computational power for playback, often leading to stuttering streams. As a result, many editors have had to create proxies before editing — a time-consuming process that requires additional storage and lowers fidelity while editing.

The GeForce RTX 50 Series adds hardware acceleration for 4:2:2 encode and decode, helping solve this computational challenge. RTX 50 Series GPUs boast a 10x acceleration in 4:2:2 encoding and can decode up to 8K 75 frames per second — equivalent to 10x 4K 30fps streams per decoder.

The most popular video editing apps, including Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve, CapCut and Wondershare Filmora, support NVIDIA hardware acceleration for 4:2:2 encode and decode. Adobe Premiere Pro offers decode support.

Combining 4:2:2 support with NVIDIA hardware increases creative possibilities. 10-bit 4:2:2 retains more color information than 8-bit 4:2:0, resulting in more accurate color representations and better color grading results for video editors.

The extra color data from 4:2:2 support allows for increased flexibility during color correction and grading for more detailed adjustments. Improved keying enables cleaner and more accurate extractions of subjects from background, as well as sharper edges for smaller keyed objects.

Generative AI-Powered Video Editing

Generative AI models are enabling video editors to generate filler video, extend clips, modify videos styles and apply advanced visual effects with speed and ease, drastically reducing production times.

Popular models like WAN or LTX Video can generate higher-quality video with greater prompt accuracy and faster load times.

GeForce RTX and NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs based on NVIDIA Blackwell enable these large, complex models to run quickly and on device, with support thanks to NVIDIA CUDA optimizations for PyTorch. Plus, the fifth-generation Tensor Cores in these GPUs offer support for FP4 quantization, allowing developers and enthusiasts to improve performance by over 2x and halve the VRAM needed.

Cutting-Edge Video Editing AI Features

Modern video editing apps provide an impressive array of advanced AI features — accelerated by GeForce RTX and NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs.

DaVinci Resolve Studio 20, now in general release, adds new AI effects and integrates NVIDIA TensorRT to optimize AI performance. One of the new features, UltraNR Noise Reduction, is an AI-driven noise reduction mode that intelligently targets and reduces digital noise in video footage to maintain image clarity while minimizing softening. UltraNR Noise Reduction runs up to 75% faster on the GeForce RTX 5090 GPU than the previous generation.

Magic Mask is another AI-powered feature in DaVinci Resolve that enables users to quickly and accurately select and track objects, people or features within a scene, simplifying the process of creating masks and effects. Magic Mask v2 adds a paint brush to further adjust masking selections for more accurate and faster workflows.

Topaz Video AI Pro video enhancement software uses AI models like Gaia and Artemis to intelligently increase video resolution to 4K, 8K and even 16K — adding detail and sharpness while minimizing artifacts and noise. The software also benefits from TensorRT acceleration.

Topaz Starlight mini, the first local desktop diffusion model for video enhancement, can enhance footage — from tricky 8/16mm film to de-interlaced mini-DV video — that may otherwise be challenging for traditional AI models to handle. The model delivers exceptional quality at the cost of intensive compute requirements, meaning it can only run locally on RTX GPUs.

Adobe Premiere Pro recently released several new AI features, such as Adobe Media Intelligence, which uses AI to analyze footage and apply semantic tags to clips. This lets users more easily and quickly find specific footage by describing its content, including objects, locations, camera angles and even transcribed spoken words. Media Intelligence runs 30% faster on the GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU compared with the GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU.

Adobe’s Enhance Speech feature improves the quality of recorded speech by filtering out unwanted noise and making the audio sound clearer. Enhance Speech runs 7x faster on GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPUs compared with the MacBook Pro M4 Max.

Cut Like a Pro

GeForce RTX and NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs are built to deliver the computational power needed for advanced video editing workflows.

These GPUs contain powerful NVIDIA hardware decoders (NVDEC) to unlock smooth playback and scrubbing of high-resolution video footage and multi-stream videos without the need for proxies. NVDEC is supported in Adobe Premiere Pro, CapCut, DaVinci Resolve, Vegas Pro and Wondershare Filmora.

Creative apps use these additional encoders in GeForce RTX 5080 and 5090 GPUs, as well as RTX PRO 6000, 5000, 4500 and 4000 Blackwell GPUs — and now features support for 4:2:2.

Creators can use the RTX 5080 and 5090, for example, to import 5x 8K30 or 20x 4K30 streams at once, or import 10x 4K60 to do multi-camera editing and review multiple camera angles without slowdown. With the RTX PRO 6000, this can be boosted to up to 10x 8K30 or 40x 4K30 streams.

NVIDIA CUDA cores accelerate video and image processing effects such as motion tracking, sharpening, upsampling, transition effects and other computationally intensive tasks. They also accelerate rendering times, enable real-time previews while working with high-resolution video footage and speed up AI features, such as automatic color correction, object removal and noise reduction.

When it’s time to export, video editors that use the GeForce RTX 50 Series ninth-generation NVIDIA video encoder can get a 5% improvement in video quality on HEVC and AV1 encoding (BD-BR), resulting in higher-quality exports at the same bitrates.

Plus, a new Ultra High Quality (UHQ) mode available in the latest Blackwell encoder boosts quality by an additional 5% for HEVC and AV1 and is backwards-compatible with the GeForce RTX 40 Series.

DaVinci Resolve, CapCut and Filmora also support multi-encoder encoding, either via split encoding — where an input frame is divided into three parts, each processed by a different NVENC encoder — or simultaneous scene encoding, in which a video is split by groups of pictures that are each sent to an encoder to batch the operation for up to 2.5x faster export performance.

Tune in to NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote at NVIDIA GTC Paris at VivaTech on June 11. Check out full-day workshops on June 10 and two days of technical sessions, training and certifications.

Stay tuned for more RTX and AI powered advances in content creation.

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