REDCINE-X and RED Player Only Use One Core?

[Tom Wardrop]

Why do REDCINE-X and RED Player only seem to use one of my four cores for decoding R3D files? All video decoders I've ever dealt with have been multi-threaded and will use 100% of the CPU if needed for smooth playback. REDCINE-X and RED Player seem only to consume 25% of my IvyBridge CPU and hence fails to playback any R3D file in real-time at full resolution. Any explanation for this?

 

[Doug Beatty]

You'll never get real-time full resoloution playback without a red rocket.

Another thing you can try to improve playback is to set your Maximum Memory Usage in RC-X (Preferences -> Playback) all the way up to 100%.

 

[Tom Wardrop]

You'll never get real-time full resoloution playback without a red rocket.

Is that just an imposed limitation to sell more rockets? It's nearly playing real-time at 30% CPU, if it used all my cores, it would rip through it with no trouble. I'll try 32-bit version and check out the preference as I have 32GB of RAM.

 

[Jeremy Wiles]

Is that just an imposed limitation to sell more rockets?

I've been wondering the same thing.

 

[Neil Cronin]

Redcine-X routinely uses all of my cores on OSX on a Mac Pro. I've never seen it peg all cores at once, though (which would be 50% total CPU usage, since my CPUs are hyperthreaded). It's a 64 bit process, and it is currently using 46 threads and 11GB of RAM (private bytes). Laptops may be different, as they can overclock one core for stuff that seems single threaded. Windows has a different thread scheduler obviously, and I haven't ever run this on Windows so I can't comment on that.

 

[Nick Shaw]

This is the CPU usage on my i7 17" MacBook Pro:

 

[Tom Wardrop]

I find the 32-bit REDCINE-X to be about half the speed of the 64-bit version, even though CPU usage is about the same (~30%), so sticking with 64-bit version. It seems the extra 5% - 8% of CPU usage is devoted to actual playback. It uses strictly 25% CPU when rendering ahead without playing it back at the same time. Would be nice to get an answer from someone at RED on this, as video processing is relatively simple to parallelize, and to be honest, this is probably the first video application I've seen in a long time that doesn't make use of more than one core.

I should add, this is on Windows 7 x64. I do have a Macbook on my desk also (run both a Windows and Mac machine through a dual-screen KVM), but it's a relatively low spec Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro 13", so I'm not even going to bother.

 

[Kevin Marshall]

I recall seeing a few threads on this over the years. This is particularly frustrating for me, because in Resolve or Premiere, I can easily play 1/4 res in real time using about 40% of my CPU - with 1/2 res pulling around 15fps (I think). In REDCINE-X, however, even 1/8 res will choke up sometimes - and the CPU never breaks 30% use.

I know I won't get real time/full res playback on my system, but I can't understand why REDCINE-X handles R3Ds worse than 3rd-party products.

 

[Tom Wardrop]

I don't own a RED camera. I like playing around with others R3D files, etc, though I would love to get a RED camera at some point in time. If I was a RED customer, I'd be absolutely pissed about this. At the moment, it's crap, but I don't use REDCINE-X very often; would be a different story if I had a RED camera.