A Mercury linear color delimma... bad transitions vs. bad animation

Question

Am I missing something here? I'm writing this as sort of a PSA... if you aren't aware of all sides of this issue, I hope you read the second half because you may not realize it's affecting you, too.
When I enable CUDA or Maximum Render Quality, I basically can't use any one-sided transitions. They look wrong and "pop" at the ends.
Apparently, Adobe forgot to rewrite any of their transitions for a linear color space, so Mercury+CUDA basically "breaks" all the transitions that ship with CS5, causing them to render differently than they do in their originally intended gamma of 1.8. I've heard they've added a linear-compatible transition into CS5.5 called "Film dissolve", but there aren't any in CS5. This seems like a pretty huge oversight... I'm surprised they still haven't fixed it in a patch to the original CS5.
So why not just turn off Maximum Render Quality and CUDA during output?
Well, there's another big problem.
If you do any kind of stills animation a la "the Ken Burns Effect" in Premiere, you'll quickly find Premiere leaves a "pixel shimmer" or "ripple" effect across the animation because it is using substandard methods to antialias motion. Looks like a cheap NLE from 2002.
So, you're left to choose... do you want bad one-sided dissolves or bad animation? Personally, I believe a good NLE should not leave identifiable footprints in the edit. If you happen to have have *both* in a Premiere CS5 timeline and it goes out on TV, I'll be able to "out" your NLE as Premiere because no matter which output setting you choose, one or the other problem will show up.
SOLUTION 1: Use AE. The simplest solution is probably to avoid Maximum Render quality and avoid keyframing any Motion parameters. Do it all in After Effects.
SOLUTION 2: Use CS4. It may be possible to edit your sequence with all the benefits of MPE and CUDA, and then send your timeline back to Premiere CS4 and have Premiere/Encoder CS4 render it at max quality. I haven't tested this yet, but I'm intrigued by this possibility. I'll try it soon and report back.
Hopefully I am missing something here. I'm an Avid/FCP/AE guy who is still relatively new to Premiere.
P.S. A second issue is lower thirds and alpha graphics. I bet you made all of yours in After Effects with a 1.8 gamma, didn't you? As far as I know, Premiere does not ship with any video effects that easily control the gamma curve of the alpha channel, so there's no quick fix for all of your currently rendered transparent graphics.

Answer 1

I know if I use the MPE in GPU mode transitions between two PIPs will get a funny black border aroud the PIP. CUDA can do some funny things when transitions and filters that do not have CUDA support are used with GPU enabled. I can only hope Adobe is getting ready to switch to Open CL or Open GL because there are a few glitches with Nvidia's CUDA technology. For Quality I almost think CS 4 was better but you don't get the same amount of realtime. I hope PP CS 6.0 is true broadcast quality instead of just realtime previews. Edius can do it with out the use of GPU acceleration.  I think CUDA is a step in the right direction but I also think it needs a bit more time to mature.