Something Special... ( REDCINE-X )

[Mark L. Pederson]

Hi Jarred,

Can we assume we would be able to output 4k via the GPU directly or do we still need a BMD or a Rocket to do it ? GPU debayer with a seiki could be the cheapest 4k workflow for indie, commercial of music video.

The Titan is HDMI 1.4a compatible - so ... yeah, you should be able to output 4K directly from the HDMI port of the GPU. I currently do this with an ATI card in one of my Scratch systems (which uses two Red Rockets to debayer).

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Titan outputs UHD/ 4K just fine.

For those of you using the SEIKI monitors, beware that the internal components only drive the panel at full resolution at 30Hz. Every other mode it accepts is pulled up to 30Hz. So running 24fps material at UHD/4K to the SEIKI, you will always see judder. Always. Once I finally pinned down enough reliable 4K sources to identify this problem, and subsequently got confirmation from SEIKI, all I can say is that I've been pretty disillusioned with the display. I still have it, it's fine for what it is and the great price, but I'll never use it to show 4K 24fps material to a client. Ever. I don't know if in EU/ PAL regions where the AC operates at 50Hz if the panel syncs at 25Hz directly or not.

 

[Hans Magnus Kvåle]

This is indeed good news but I am a bit unsure what would be our best investment now.
I am currently working on the current Mac Pro tower with Intel Xeon Westmere 12-core processor, 32gb memory, ATI Radeon 5870, Esata/USB 3 card and RED Rocket. This has been and still is a very good machine which I'd like to keep, but with the upcoming Dragon workflow might be the limit?
We have ordered the new REDROCKET X card but now that REDCINE X wil support gpu we might be better of dropping the new Rocket X card, selling our current Mac Pro (and Rocket) and put our money in the new upcoming Mac Pro?
I must also add that I'll rather shoot myself in both legs before I go back to Windows;-)

 

[Martin Christien]

"I must also add that I'll rather shoot myself in both legs before I go back to Windows;-)"

Yeah I feel you Hans, my Windows PC still asks where my printer is ... I wouldn't mind but I never hooked a printer up to it! ;-)

 

[Patrick Grossien]

Very modular, very upgradeable. I have actually got a personal taste of one a few weeks back.
...
I think the new one is a lot more fitting to their customer base.

Great, thanks man for the insight.

So youre saying that it wont be everybody ... how would you define the customer base in terms of our business and including RED Raw workflow? So editing, col correction, and basic compositing will be covered well, I take it?!

 

[Eric Santiago]

Great, thanks man for the insight.

So youre saying that it wont be everybody ... how would you define the customer base in terms of our business and including RED Raw workflow? So editing, col correction, and basic compositing will be covered well, I take it?!

Same question would go for REDUSERs that live and die with their iMac/rMBP I guess.

Since no one has any major experience with the tube, its all but a dream still

 

[Patrick Grossien]

Well after all we can relax anyway, I'd guess. You can already work with a maxed out iMac/ MBP just not as fast especially in transcodes. So everything on top, incl the new redcine will only make it better.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

You might need to upgrade it.. you need a "real" graphics card to do this kind of heavy lifting... the 680MX is great, but its still classified as a notebook video card ( or an under-clocked desktop card ) depending how you look at it, and 2GB is not a ton of memory nowadays.

Will *any* GPU grant a boost to transcode speeds? I'm not asking my laptop to give me real time 24fps full 4K debayer . . . but it currently takes me around 25x time to transcode from r3d to Prores (so a 1 minute clip takes about 25 minutes). I expect that to go up a little when I upgrade to a new laptop whenever Apple drops the next round. It could go up a LOT if the GPU helps.

And it could help me an ungodly amount in Da Vinci if it gets added to the SDK, and not just RCX.

 

[Will Keir]

Will only Dragon footage benefit from GPU Debayer, or ALL RED footage, including R1 to MX?

This is software in the new RCX for now and will eventually be given to Adobe, BlackMagic and the rest?

One of the reasons this took so long for us to be able to offload to GPU is that the cards just were not fast enough back when we started all this. There was the quadroplex floating around but it was pretty complicated and expensive, Rocket card was cheaper and easier. Now we finally have graphics cards pushing Ghz and more V memory than our entire computers had back in 2005.

 

[Stephen Gentle]

I don't know if in EU/ PAL regions where the AC operates at 50Hz if the panel syncs at 25Hz directly or not.

I don't think it would be any different - I didn't think any TVs have used the power source for timing since the analogue days... I was under the impression that our TVs were pretty much exactly the same as yours (with the exception of having a DVB-T tuner instead of ATSC).

 

[Dave P]

BareFeat's benchmark shows the GTX680 Mac card holding step with a flashed GTX780..

Quick correction, if you were referring to these tests:

http://barefeats.com/gpu680v7.html

The flashed cards are in fact GTX770s.

I know this since I just finished work on EFI GTX780 and GTX Titan last night.

The 770 is at most 10% faster than a 680 as it is same card with higher clocks and faster RAM, but the 780/Titan are a newer, better architecture. (GK110 vs GK107)

The 780 is at most 10% over spec for Mac power, I am using it trouble free in 3,1 and 4,1 for hours on end.

EFI Titan and allow you to put a newer, better card in your current Mac Pro then what will ship in the top of the line Mac-ina-Can when it does ship.

They are awesome cards and MacVidCards is proud to offer full boot screen support as well as PCIE speeds in OSX and Windows via Bootcamp.

So, no Barefats tests yet, but once I get some cards together and off to Portland, there will be.

MacVidCards

 

[Gabriele Turchi]

is this going to be available trough SDK as well ?

thanks

g

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I don't think it would be any different - I didn't think any TVs have used the power source for timing since the analogue days... I was under the impression that our TVs were pretty much exactly the same as yours (with the exception of having a DVB-T tuner instead of ATSC).

I'm just wondering if it is different though because I don't see any of the PAL guys complaining about the 30fps pull-up judder. Then again, most people are blissfully unaware because they don't have 4K sources to show.

I didn't notice it right off because in the beginning the two sources I had were the Rocket via BOB and a borrowed Hi5-4K and an Oppo BP-103 upconverting Blu-Ray player. From the Rocket setup, I initially tested some 30fps and some 24fps and the judder didn't pop out at me immediately. I did see it, but also ran across some intermittent sync issues -- so I focused on those. I saw the judder from the Blu-Ray player and I had been discussing back and forth with Oppo over it and SEIKI as well and both of them seemed confused. Then I discovered that the judder from the OPPO at 4K went away on the SEIKI when playing 30fps material. I was using the SEIKI at 30fps as a secondary display, so sure there were cadence issues there for 24fps playback as expected, so no red flags went up there. When everything finally pulled together and I pinned down the issue was when the REDRAY arrived. First of all, it doesn't play nice with the SEIKI unless we use a signal booster of some sort. Got that solved and then all I saw with 24fps material was pull-up judder. Still the same with 24fps material from the OPPO. Put it back on as a secondary monitor on my HP and set it to 24Hz there. Judder. Finally after a bunch of hounding, I got the guys at SEIKI to acknowledge the issue and state that in 4K mode, the panel is always run at 30Hz, regardless of input signal. I've asked if this is the only way it will always work or if it's something that can be addressed via firmware. They have gone silent with no answer.

The 39" also has the same 30Hz lock at 4K and motion judder issues.

On the bright side, I have the Samsung 55" 4K monitor delivering friday morning.

I had the 55" Sony here for a bit, but that thing has issues too. I sent it back. I'm supposed to be getting a 70" 4K display (not the one from Sharp) in about a month, I'm not allowed to say who makes it just yet.

The Sharp 70" is very nice, nicer than the Sony 65" for the same money. I don't know how it compares to the Samsung 65" as I haven't seen the Samsungs with my own eyes just yet.... friday.

Quick correction, if you were referring to these tests:

http://barefeats.com/gpu680v7.html

The flashed cards are in fact GTX770s.

I know this since I just finished work on EFI GTX780 and GTX Titan last night.

Actually it was these tests. Although that's showing GTX770's there as well. I am 99.9% positive that these benchmarks originally stated GTX780 and not GTX770. So they either made a goof and corrected it or I'm starting to go senile. :/

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Great, thanks man for the insight.

So youre saying that it wont be everybody ... how would you define the customer base in terms of our business and including RED Raw workflow? So editing, col correction, and basic compositing will be covered well, I take it?!

The consumer base being targeted by the new Mac Pro: Those who need a capable and fast desktop with 8 to 12 cores (16 to 24 threads), one or two upper mid-range GPUs and fast connectivity. PCIe slots are not paramount to these users, but the OS is and the machines will continue to fit the need of being the last true production Unix boxes out there from a large vendor.

How does that relate to this community? I think many will find them quite useful, others will not. They will be significantly more powerful than an iMac. I will be picking one of them up to start, but it's hardly my only system. It's not a system that you can buy to replace an existing Mac Pro tower if you still have need for attached peripherals or existing external storage. Sure, there are ways to make those things work, to some extent, via PCIe expanders and whatnot. None of those solutions are elegant or economical.

This community and the needs of its members are very diverse. Some will find this new Mac to be a great system, others will find something to fit their needs elsewhere. FWIW, I'm very excited about it and I think it will be a great computer. But there's no way I could make it be my go-to system for everything. Perhaps in the future, a few generations down the line of the new platform, it may become more that system. At this point I don't think anyone, even Apple, knows just where this will lead us...

 

[andrewhake]

Quite interested to see how this will perform on a new Mac Pro with 6GB GPUS

 

[Mike P.]

Yes, but will it run realtime on an Intel HD4000...






... heh : )

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I like cineform from a technical standpoint but it's just way too expensive. If you have one edit machine it makes economical sense. But if you want to render off of a farm to it, you can't justify $1,000 to every machine just to write to a codec. That money could go into a 10GigE infrastructure.

I don't see any reason why DNxHD couldn't scale to 4k. I would imagine it's just a question of demand. The real question though is why we would want to transcode to different intermediate codec when you could load REDRAW @ 24fps on a normal workstation. The main reason I transcode is for performance.

 

[AndreasOberg]

One thing I'm finding really exciting about the Mac Pros is that they are so portable. Its almost as if you have a lighting/vfx station in the size of a "laptop", well except the screen. I'm already looking into how one can have a portable screen to bring in the airplane to use with them. I love our Apple Retinas but they are a bit sluggish when using Final Cut Pro X and you can never have enough power for grading and VFX.
Its a pity that most programs are so poorly optimized, especially After Effects needs a lot of work to reach its potential. Many of its operations are still single threaded and very little is GPU accelerated I'm afraid so a program like After Effect will not benefit THAT greatly from multi cpu/GPU systems.
/Andreas

 

[Dave Blackham]

I'm just wondering if it is different though because I don't see any of the PAL guys complaining about the 30fps pull-up judder. Then again, most people are blissfully unaware because they don't have 4K sources to show.

I didn't notice it right off because in the beginning the two sources I had were the Rocket via BOB and a borrowed Hi5-4K and an Oppo BP-103 upconverting Blu-Ray player. From the Rocket setup, I initially tested some 30fps and some 24fps and the judder didn't pop out at me immediately. I did see it, but also ran across some intermittent sync issues -- so I focused on those. I saw the judder from the Blu-Ray player and I had been discussing back and forth with Oppo over it and SEIKI as well and both of them seemed confused. Then I discovered that the judder from the OPPO at 4K went away on the SEIKI when playing 30fps material. I was using the SEIKI at 30fps as a secondary display, so sure there were cadence issues there for 24fps playback as expected, so no red flags went up there. When everything finally pulled together and I pinned down the issue was when the REDRAY arrived. First of all, it doesn't play nice with the SEIKI unless we use a signal booster of some sort. Got that solved and then all I saw with 24fps material was pull-up judder. Still the same with 24fps material from the OPPO. Put it back on as a secondary monitor on my HP and set it to 24Hz there. Judder. Finally after a bunch of hounding, I got the guys at SEIKI to acknowledge the issue and state that in 4K mode, the panel is always run at 30Hz, regardless of input signal. I've asked if this is the only way it will always work or if it's something that can be addressed via firmware. They have gone silent with no answer.

The 39" also has the same 30Hz lock at 4K and motion judder issues.

On the bright side, I have the Samsung 55" 4K monitor delivering friday morning.

I had the 55" Sony here for a bit, but that thing has issues too. I sent it back. I'm supposed to be getting a 70" 4K display (not the one from Sharp) in about a month, I'm not allowed to say who makes it just yet.

The Sharp 70" is very nice, nicer than the Sony 65" for the same money. I don't know how it compares to the Samsung 65" as I haven't seen the Samsungs with my own eyes just yet.... friday.




Actually it was these tests. Although that's showing GTX770's there as well. I am 99.9% positive that these benchmarks originally stated GTX780 and not GTX770. So they either made a goof and corrected it or I'm starting to go senile. :/

Is it worth a database and review being created as a resource so we all know whats what ? happy to help if this is thought to be useful.

 

[Matthew Love]

Jeff or Jarred, what would you guys say to my current setup.

12 core 2.66 mac pro. 64gb ram, GTX 570.

I'm going to add a cubix which I'd love to add 2 additional GPUs too. Jeff, with the tower I'm running now what would you say the optimal setup would be to handle a GPU based dragon/5k transcode? even though I'm sure we have no way to tell obviously as of yet. I just want to hit the ground running! haha