Adobe Premiere Pro is a hugely popular video editing software used commonly in the TV and film industry alike. Premiere Pro already supports OpenCL on Macs for a year. Now AMD and Adobe have got together to support open standard to Windows with the software’s next version.

Premiere Pro (curent version CS5 in 2010) added support for a collection of GPU-accelerated effects with Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine. However at the time support was limited to NVIDIA cards due to the use of CUDA.

AMD did not have that support at that time reportedly due to the fact that Adobe was not satisfied with the state of OpenCL at the time. On the Mac, Adobe added OpenCL support for some (but not quite all) effects in CS6. The PC version of CS6 continued to be CUDA powered.

It is claimed that this is probably the first time Windows will have the hardware-accelerated video editing using OpenCL. On an A10-6800K processor with integrated graphics, they claim that exporting video with effects from a raw source to a final format can now be done up to 4.3 times faster. This will be a significant performance improvement. The quoted processing times with OpenCL enabled are 46.6 seconds and 246.1 seconds without it.

Release date of this version of Premiere Pro is not known yet. However Adobe says it’s set to unveil some “incredible enhancements” to its video editing tools at NAB next week can give you some clue.

AMD says all of its A-series APUs are supported along with Radeon and FirePro graphics cards. The OpenCL acceleration is expected to enable “real-time edits, application of dozens of effects, support for the new Lumetri deep color engine and multi-stream and mixed format accelerated workflows with AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology.” It will also support video formats up to 4K Ultra HD.