OK Realllllly Frustrated

[Keith Neff]

Has anybody got a formula for a PC that will run RedCine reliably? We have it running on a MacPro just fine but just don't feel like paying $4K+ each for what is essentially a render machine.
Tried on a NVidia based machine this time rather than the Radeon which never rendered anything but garbage.
Specs: Dual Core 2.66/MSI NX8500GT. Now whenever we try any preview it plays a few frames then goes to a blue preview with red lettering and that's it.
If we are ever to get this workflow working there needs to be a solid, cost effective solution available.

Just venting but we need to provide shooting and lab services for the Red camera but there seems to be no defined solution, other than Mac.
:ranting2:

 

[R Fogg]

I was having similar issues on my PC. A lot of blue frame issues, lots of RC freeze ups etc. I was using a brand new nvidia 8800gt card and I was also using a moderately powered dual core machine but I really could never load more than a couple of clips into the timeline with out a freeze or a blue screen.

The following steps resolved the issues.
1. Go into the system properties settings and under the advanced tab, click on performance settings button then under visual settings and click the adjust for best performance box.
2. In performance settings under the advanced tab make sure both proccessor scheduling and memory usage are set to programs.
3. On the same advanced tab click under the virtual memory settings, click the change button and set the virtual memory settings to system managed sized.

Doing this reduced my RC hangups and freezes by 90%. Let me know if that works for you.

Good Luck

 

[Chase Gordon]

Just venting but we need to provide shooting and lab services for the Red camera but there seems to be no defined solution, other than Mac.

I believe Scratch is the defined solution for the PC. I'm told it produces the best results. Assimilate is offering a 14 day demo license if you want to try it out, although they specify you need to use an nVidia QuadroFX video card. My guess is that if you install this card in your PC then RedCine will also work. See http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=9948 for details on the demo license offer

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

Kieth,

At the current time, RED's support of PC / Premiere is horrid at best. There are solutions out there that can make your PC render r3d files at incredible speeds and the workflow is seamless. But RED has halted release of these solutions for two reasons I am aware of:

1: RED has agreements with Apple and Assimilate, or perhaps the word is loyality. They do not wish to open the playing field to competition in this area until NAB '08
2: RED is concerned with image quality and they worry that 3rd party company's may render RED's footage a quality levels below that of RED's expectations.

There is a possible 3rd explaination that I will share with you: RED may be looking into their own solution and perhaps they want theirs out before they allow anyone else's (This is a huge guess, I would not put much stock in it... I don't!

While I do not agree with RED's actions in this manner, it's important to note that NAB is 4 weeks away and, according to Jim Jannard himself, 3rd party companies will be able to provide their own solutions at that time.

When that happens, I feel you will get everything you want and more.

Jay

 

[Adam Glick]

RedCine and Scratch seem to always work reliably with NVIDIA Quadro cards...

I have never seen a blue screen or instability when using a Quadro card and dual-quadcore Xeon workstation running Windows XP.

my $.02

 

[Keith Neff]

First, thanks for the quick comments. Ryley I will check out the settings suggestions and post if it improves.
Jay, I hoping you are right that there are nailed down solutions coming because we don't have the luxury of telling the client 'sorry we are having software problems and have no idea how to solve them right now, will get back to you later'.
We also run a film lab where we don't have the option to say, 'gee we put it in the one end of the processor and it didn't come out the other, sorry'.
It will be telling to see if someone can define a PC that can perform this task in a production environment.
If anyone has one let us know.

 

[Finner]

While I do not agree with RED's actions in this manner, it's important to note that NAB is 4 weeks away and, according to Jim Jannard himself, 3rd party companies will be able to provide their own solutions at that time.

Jim also says "everything is subject to change".

 

[Chris Swinbanks]

It will be telling to see if someone can define a PC that can perform this task in a production environment.
If anyone has one let us know.

Not the full answer, as its not quite "in production" as yet, however its working under some reasonable testing so far...
HP xw6600 Workstation
WIN32 Version 5.01 (Build: 2600 - Service Pack 2)
8 CPU's: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5440 @ 2.83GHz
Physical memory : 3072 Mb
Display Device: NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700

Exporting 10bit log DPX files mainly (for 2k grading)

We also run a film lab where we don't have the option to say, 'gee we put it in the one end of the processor and it didn't come out the other, sorry'.

Just hand the client a strip of Dolby sound neg, point to the dots and say, there you go....

should be good for a laugh for a couple of seconds at least... :biggrin:

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

Jim also says "everything is subject to change".

This is true Fin, but in this case I wonder how long RED can keep these 3rd party vendors, who have not signed ANY agreements with RED, from entering into this.. From my view, people have stayed at bay, not because they have too but out of respect and honor for RED achievements.

Also the line "Everything is subject to change" applies to Camera development and creation issues, it's not a "Break your word and get away with it" card. In this case Jim needs to do nothing except stand back and let the other children play.

Jim said NAB '08 and while he may change HIS mind, I seriously doubt others will go along with him much past that. And they shouldn't. There was no legal basis for this in the first place. RED's agreements do not apply to others.

As a customer who edits on PC, if he did do that, I would be a very very unhappy person.

You know, I would like to think that EVERYONE would want more companies involved in post. I mean, REDCine is moving very slow, and by RED's own admission, they have NOT supported PC as much as they could, not because of technical problems, but because they are trying to throw business MAC's way in exchange for their mutual agreement (Although I have not really seen Apple do that much for RED). This choice has made post very difficult for a lot of people.

While I am not THRILLED with Premiere, it's getting better and has more ability to edit in 2k+ resolution with full bit depth than FCP can on it's best day. In a sense, it's much closer to the post workflow RED is designed for, and we can't use it.... Ouch.

If you want PC support to be opened up, shout it out, make it clear, or you may be waiting a lot longer.

Jay

 

[Obin Olson]

I don't want pc post I NEED it and now!

Loud enough?

 

[Andrew M.]

It is very frustrating that PC platform and REDCINE is not working right now.
Yes, maybe there is one or two PC configs that will work with current release of REDCINE but the fact that it is so unstable on most configs it is making REDCINE unusable.
We have Dell machines with NVIDIA or ATI cards and nothing works stable.
Even the fastest laptop on the market and the only one with RAID 0 disks build in, Dell XPS M1730 doesn’t work with REDCINE!!

Most problems are traceable to the memory management by REDCINE.
Crashing and blue screens are 90% of the time what we get.
If we are lucky we get few clips out to DPX or TIF that is all.

If REDCINE is so crappy then RED should open the RED RAW and let good companies do the job.

I understand that maybe RED RAW compression is using some trick in it that they don’t want to show to all, though I have impression that RED RAW was reverse engineered already?

In any case RED should provide utility to convert RED RAW to RAW RAW if they do not want to document all REDRAW features.

Usually in time there will be one company out there that will process RAW from RED camera bit better then Graeme can do it, so open standard here is a must.

Pushing everybody in to the SCRATCH is bit overkill.

 

[Keith Neff]

Not the full answer, as its not quite "in production" as yet, however its working under some reasonable testing so far...
HP xw6600 Workstation
WIN32 Version 5.01 (Build: 2600 - Service Pack 2)
8 CPU's: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5440 @ 2.83GHz
Physical memory : 3072 Mb
Display Device: NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700

Exporting 10bit log DPX files mainly (for 2k grading)

Just hand the client a strip of Dolby sound neg, point to the dots and say, there you go....

should be good for a laugh for a couple of seconds at least... :biggrin:

Thanks for the system suggestion, I'll let engineering mull it over. Hand them the Dolby and tell them it's their 'digital' film transfer!

 

[laguun]

Jim also says "everything is subject to change".

it would be -catastrophic- for the owners, users and cameras perception in the market if red would continue locking out 3hrd parties.

the camera is great, outstanding and cant get enough praise.
the workflow if one wants to stay in REDCODE right now is sadly among the most complicated and slowest of any digital camera system.

Right now in Berlin, there is an exhibition and all the usual suspects as Silicon Imaging / PS with their SI2K, Sony with their 790/900R/F23, Red, Arri etc. etc.

Many cameramen returning from this exhibition are excited by the different workflows of si, and red is loosing quite a bit of its momentum.

And the permanent "hey, spend 50.000$ on another DI system and everything is fine for 2K with RED" and "edit redcode at once in FCP" is really getting tiring.

The REDCODE postproduction tools right now are unstable and are missing basic functionality as EDL, require 2 operting systems, 50.000$ added cost per camera even if you have (as we do) many class 1 HD displays, several di systems and lots of of interchanges between different people and are -not- able to be networked, as redcode in full quality doesnt work with shake, combustion, after effects, digital fusion, nuke, 3ds max, maya, xsi, premiere, encore, apple color... basicly the bread and butter of the industry is locked out of fullquality redcode without additional steps.

And the main point is: Most people who will work with the RED cameras images -dont own- the camera, and never have been to reduser. As long the workflow is unstable, complicated and requires lots of rendering and transcoding, forces users to pay 3 times the price of the camera for a native redcode online etc we will see more and more disappointed users.

-full- 3hrd party support,
-EDL/TC support in Redcine and Quicktime and/or AVI and/or virtual filesystem
-on windows and osx
-redline for windows (or linux)
are -crucial- to continue REDs success.

i really wish that red would lay out a basic roadmap for the evolution of the postworkflow.

 

[Sean]

RedCine has been running very, very smoothly and is entirely stable on my homebuilt, not very expensive system. Sounds like nVidia Quadro FX cards are the key! You can get them pretty cheaply second-hand if you don't buy the latest and greatest. I'm running RedCine with the nVidia Quadro FX 3450 which I purchased for $400 used about a year ago (because it is the only card that Avid Media Composer likes too. In the PC video world, it seems it's common for this type of software to be quite fussy about the video card, and the advantage to that is that Avid can also then guarantee stability on at least a few configurations. No one can guarantee stability on all!).

So consider grabbing yourself an nVidia Quadro FX 3450 or spend a bit more and get the 3500 or something. I have a feeling a lot of these problems will vanish for you (of course there's never any guarantees).

My system:

Intel Xeon CPU X3210
4 gigs DDR2 RAM
nVidia Quadro FX 3450
P5E WS motherboard

I was also running RedCine without fail on an Intel Core 2 Duo and the P5NSLI motherboard. Again with the nVidia Quadro FX 3450.

 

[Andrew M.]

RedCine has been running very, very smoothly and is entirely stable on my homebuilt, not very expensive system. Sounds like nVidia Quadro FX cards are the key!

Sean, what is the time per rendered frame to 16 bit TIF or 10 bit DPX on your machine?

Also, did you try to run full 4 minute render in to the TIF or DPX without any lost frame or freeze?

I can run short 30 seconds to 1 minutes clips with 20% or so success rate.
I have noticed that once it render the clip without the problem then I can render again and again.

How many minutes of footage did you render so far total?

Andrew

 

[R Fogg]

Hey Andrew I have a pretty cheap system and I can export DPX files fine (albeit slowly @ about 1 frame every 2 seconds at full res). I was having lots of problems with RC handling memory until I realized I had a custom virtual memory size set which would overflow easily. I reset to system managed virtual memory and that (along with a few other tweaks I described in an earlier post) seemed to resolve 90% of RC instability issues I was having.

 

[Andrew M.]

Hey Andrew I have a pretty cheap system and I can export DPX files fine (albeit slowly @ about 1 frame every 2 seconds at full res). I was having lots of problems with RC handling memory until I realized I had a custom virtual memory size set which would overflow easily. I reset to system managed virtual memory and that (along with a few other tweaks I described in an earlier post) seemed to resolve 90% of RC instability issues I was having.

I read your post and right away I did try it on two of our computers and one laptop.

Didn’t help much.

I got the NVIDIA utility to tweak the NVIDIA parameters.

One in particular, the verbose error report seems like making the difference.
It will work or quit with clean error report of what is wrong.
By default it is disabled.

I will keep tweaking

 

[Sean]

Sean, what is the time per rendered frame to 16 bit TIF or 10 bit DPX on your machine?

Also, did you try to run full 4 minute render in to the TIF or DPX without any lost frame or freeze?

I can run short 30 seconds to 1 minutes clips with 20% or so success rate.
I have noticed that once it render the clip without the problem then I can render again and again.

How many minutes of footage did you render so far total?

Andrew

Render time for TIF 16 bit from 4K 2:1 is about 1 second per frame.

And you're right, Andrew, I do get the freeze frame issue after a certain time/file size is reached. Sounds like everyone is getting that. So I'm incorrect in saying I'm TOTALLY stable with the nVidia Quadro FX card.

If I stay under a certain file size, I get 100% success. Over a certain size/time and it fails, giving me the freeze frame issue.

 

[Keith Neff]

Time for Red to chime in to let us know the PC configuration they are using to test RedCine and how well it is working for them.

 

[Sean]

Upgraded my motherboard and CPU yesterday (still using nVidia Quadro FX 3450). Just rendered 3,465 frames (2:24) at TIF 16 without any problem. No freeze frame. About 1 second per frame render time.

I was getting freeze frame issues with my other system. But I was mainly testing DNxHD QuickTime output.

I'll try a full four minutes of rendering.