Imagine you have a top-of-the-line Mac Pro, NVIDIA's obscenely expensive Quadro FX 4800 workstation GPU, dual 30" Cinema Displays, and you're editing your next masterpiece in Premiere Pro, After Effects, or Final Cut Pro (or maybe all three!). You might be dying for Snow Leopard and OpenCL to unlock the computing potential inside that powerful GPU, but luckily, there are a selection of plug-ins that can take advantage of that power right now.

NVIDIA has a page that lists several video effects plug-ins from Elemental Technologies, BorisFX, and Red Giant Software that are designed to leverage NVIDIA's CUDA GPGPU technology. Premiere Pro CS4 users will definitely want to check out Elemental Accelerator 1.2 for Mac, which effectively halves the time it takes to encode video in H.264/MPEG-4 for either Blu-ray or online use. Leveraging your GPU to do the encoding work can also make your system more responsive while an encoding job is running, meaning you can get more work done faster.