Sonnet Express Pro & Red Rocket

[gbalaji]

At-last received my Sonnet Express Pro and today installed Red Rocket with latest drivers.Without any hassel when restarted the 17' Macbookpro while connected detected RedRocket as 4X while RedCineX Pro 14 opened and encoded more than 1000 clips worth of 5K Epic footage to 1080p24 DNxHD 36 MXF @ full debayer without any issues as full speed.I would like to know what would 8X would improve in my current workflow.Trying tomorrow connecting ATTO SAS card and backing LTO-5 Tapes using HP LTO-5 Tape Drive(SAS)


The Sonnet Express Pro works great in 4X speed, but has issue sometimes on certain clips, which throws decoding error on certain frames & System hangs and was forced to remove express pro and encode using CPU.

Attached screenshot of setup which we are running. Itprovides two PCI slots which would be of great help for On-Set LTO Backup with additional Atto SAS card in second slot.

 

[Kirk.Attard]

Glad its working well. Liking the idea I can use the red rock with more than one computer.

 

[Eric Santiago]

Thanks for your review gbalaji
A lot of us are looking forward to your findings.
Hopefully you can report back with real world results.
I'm just glad to hear you can get 4X to work with ROCKET

 

[Eric Santiago]

Here is Jeff Kilgroe's words:
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showth...-Express-Pro&p=1034465&viewfull=1#post1034465

 

[Kristian Kettner]

We just tested our Sonnet + Redrocket + early 2011 MBP today all I can say is WOW.
Download the RR driver plugged in the TB cable, and we where flying ( compared to before )

 

[Mike Halper]

I got my Sonnet today and I agree. Wow. In RCXP and Premiere Pro I get 5K realtime playback at 1/2 debayer and 4K at full debayer. RCXP chomped through transcoding 308 gigs of 4K and 5K R3D's with color correction to ProRes HQ in 87 minutes. This is all on a new Retina MBP with 2.7GHz i7 and 16GB RAM and the hard drive was an OWC Qx2 RAID-5 connected via a LaCie Thunderbolt eSATA hub. In Premiere Pro CS6 it worked in both a 5K sequence and a 1080p sequence outputting to an external monitor via a Blackmagic Design Intensity Extreme Thunderbolt.

 

[Sergio Perez]

I got my Sonnet today and I agree. Wow. In RCXP and Premiere Pro I get 5K realtime playback at 1/2 debayer and 4K at full debayer. RCXP chomped through transcoding 308 gigs of 4K and 5K R3D's with color correction to ProRes HQ in 87 minutes. This is all on a new Retina MBP with 2.7GHz i7 and 16GB RAM and the hard drive was an OWC Qx2 RAID-5 connected via a LaCie Thunderbolt eSATA hub. In Premiere Pro CS6 it worked in both a 5K sequence and a 1080p sequence outputting to an external monitor via a Blackmagic Design Intensity Extreme Thunderbolt.

Very promising! Still looking into which enclosure to get, but that is basically the setup I'm planning for myself. Thanks for the impressions!

 

[Mike Halper]

I did see this mentioned anywhere, so thought I'd ask. Is anyone else's Sonnet box pretty loud? The fans seem almost too loud.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Sonnet box is pretty quiet compared to everything else. But I think it could be (and I would like it to be) quieter. On my desk with the iMac setup, the two noise offenders are the Promise R6 RAID. It's going to be relocated as soon as those fiber optic TB cables start shipping in the next couple months. The other offender is the HP LTO-4 tape unit. I understand the need to keep these enclosures economical, however I think most users would be OK with costs going up a by $5 ~ $10 in most cases to make them nearly silent. To me it's very important in a desktop-use environment. Apparently the engineers designing some of these products don't understand that. Thankfully I only have to turn on the LTO drive when I need to use it and it's connected to the Sonnet box with an ATTO host card inside. Both it and the R6 RAID can go somewhere else once I have that fiber cable.

 

[Kennan Ward]

Jeff,

Thank you for all your sharing of information over the years. I read your posts with confidence!

This is the first I have heard of fire optic TB cables! Who, what, & where, please?

Thank you again!

Kennan

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Kennan, here's a snipped of info:

http://www.macworld.com/article/116...or_thunderbolt_ports_shipped_by_sumitomo.html


The optical cables were present and working just fine at NAB. They were being demoed at several booths including Intel, Promise and BlackMagic. Availability is supposed to be by the end of the year. Most of the demos had 100ft or so of cable on a spool with one end connected to a Mac, the other connected to whatever device they were demonstrating. I just want a 25ft. one or similar so I can move my two noisemakers into the closet. This is the one advantage of having active electronics in the cables themselves -- you can use whatever transmission medium in between your connectors. I'm expecting them to be a bit pricey to start, but the Intel people were saying the price increase was negligible. We shall see. The fiber cables don't transmit power, obviously.

 

[Travis MacRitchie]

Just got my sonnet chassis. Running a 2.3ghz mbp i7 w/ 16gb ram, osx version 10.6.8, but getting a lot of frame decode errors in redcine and cant seem to get smooth redcine-x playback. wondering if I need a beefier computer? or is my sonnet somehow not configured correctly? What specs are on your succesfuly running systems, and do you ever get frame decode errors? let me know your thoughts thanks!

 

[Tom.Wong]

you might need run lion, better optimized coding for thunderbolt. i've seen the sonnet run flawlessly on identical setups, with the exception of the OS. I've always seen it working on lion.

 

[Uli Plank]

Get ML, Adobe CS6 in particular is more stable with it. Sonnet with a RR works like a charm in RCX too.

 

[Matthew Love]

just hooked up my sonnet pro with red rocket to my retina. it's amazing how well it works.

question, if i want to unplug my thunderbolt enclosure and walk away with the laptop, can i just simply unplug the thunderbolt cable? I've been powering down the retina then when off I unplug the thunderbolt cable. Can I simply just do this while the computer is still on?

thanks!

 

[Bob Gundu]

Forst of all, did you get this working under 10.8.2? I had to roll back to 10.8.1. Secondly, you should be able to unplug but I don't think the RED card is technically hot swappable. I have had the system freeze sometime when doing so.

just hooked up my sonnet pro with red rocket to my retina. it's amazing how well it works.

question, if i want to unplug my thunderbolt enclosure and walk away with the laptop, can i just simply unplug the thunderbolt cable? I've been powering down the retina then when off I unplug the thunderbolt cable. Can I simply just do this while the computer is still on?

thanks!

 

[Dominik Muench]

I did see this mentioned anywhere, so thought I'd ask. Is anyone else's Sonnet box pretty loud? The fans seem almost too loud.

yep mine sounds like an A380 taking off in my room as well. I think its normal.

wish this baby would run 8x, would make things even more amazing.

I have the issue sometimes that when I connect the sonnet box through thunderbolt on a running system and start RedcineX...redcine wont load any clips in the viewer and deny playback...so I always have to restart the machine first once I connected the sonnet box.

I'm running my rocket on osX 10.8.2 on a 2 year old 17" MBP and it works like a breeze, no issues with playback in full quality.

 

[Matthew Love]

Bob,

I'm still running 10.8.1.. haven't made the jump to 10.8.2 until the rocket fixes happen.

Thanks for the insight though.

 

[Paul Ellington]

Forst of all, did you get this working under 10.8.2? I had to roll back to 10.8.1. Secondly, you should be able to unplug but I don't think the RED card is technically hot swappable. I have had the system freeze sometime when doing so.

Confirmation here as well, 10.8.2 will see Rocket but rendered black. Need new drivers.

 

[Chris McKechnie]

Hopefully RED can release an update soon!!