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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Color.app: Terrible framerates with wrapped R3Ds playback...

M

Mel Matsuoka

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I spent most of tonight prepping my first client-supervised grading session tomorrow morning using the new R3D workflow in Color. I'm finding some weird quirks (such as the Gamma pulldown widget randomly changing itself to another setting behind your back for no particular reason), but overall, being able to access the raw data within Color is an absolute revelation, near the level of sexual arousal.

The only thing that really bugs me is the molasses-like frame rates when playing the clips back in Color. Of course, I wasn't expecting the same level of performance that I do when working with 10-bit UC, DVCProHD or ProRes, but the 2-3 fps playback I'm getting is kinda super disappointing.

I've set the playback proxy setting to Quarter-res, and I've also set the system-wide REDCODE Quicktime settings to Half-Standard decode. Color's "Force RGB" setting doesn't help performance either. And I always configure Color to not display scopes on playback.

The R3Ds are 4k, 16x9, 23.98 clips, playing back from a 10-drive SATA stripeset. I'm running on an Early-2008 8-core MacPro (16GB RAM) w/ an ATI x1900 GPU and Kona3 board, playing out via SDI to both a standard-def CRT and a Panasonic HD display.

Is anyone here getting better performance playing back the R3Ds in Color? If so, how'd ya do it? :)

Thanks and Aloha,
mel
 
I can't suggest what exactly you're doing wrong, but I can say you ought to get much better performance than that. I get reasonable playback rates (not real-time, but perfectly usable) on my system which is very similar spec to yours.

My system is a late 2007 8-core 3GHz Mac Pro, 4GB RAM, ATIx1900, Blackmagic HD Pro, 8 drive U320 SCSI RAID5.
 
Did you enable the proxies support on color in the user preferences tab?
 
For better performance diseable force rgb and you could set internal pixel format on 8/10 bit and the switch to floating point before rendering.
 
We are getting almost real time playback with a system similar to yours. I am impressed with the speed that color can play back the raw files.
Try turning off the monitor out to AJA. Then try changing the out format to AJA (1080sf24, 1080i29.97). AJA speed test the Raid?

Dave

Mac 8 core 3.2 Ghz - 16 gb ram - Nvidia 8800 GT - AJA kona 3 - Areca 1680ix-12 SAS HBA - Enhance RS16 JS SAS Expander - 16 drive Raid-5 - Sony BVMD20FIU 20"
 
To my knowledge, current macs cannot access more than 4 gig of ram per application and this is what we are waiting on with Snow Leopard and the next gen of macs. If anyone out there knows better, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Matthew Rogers said:
Your bigger issue is probably your graphics card. A Nividi card is faster and since Color is based around your graphics card the faster, the better.

Matthew
Click to expand...
I would agree with this as a main cause of bad playback.


.
 
J Davis said:
To my knowledge, current macs cannot access more than 4 gig of ram per application and this is what we are waiting on with Snow Leopard and the next gen of macs. If anyone out there knows better, please correct me if I'm wrong.


I would agree with this as a main cause of bad playback.


.
Click to expand...

I've had bad luck with KONA 3 and Nvidia cards, tears in playback, etc.

Disk speed would be what I'm looking at. When I moved my system from a 50mB/s drive to a 250mB/s RAID, the Color performance increase was remarkable.
 
As I mentioned in my initial post, I'm spinning a 10-disk 5TB SATA RAID0 stripeset (2x5 Sonnet Fusion D500s connected to a Sonnet E4P eSATA interface card).

AJA System Test reports a sustained 438-445 MB/sec read speed from this stripeset (using the 1920x1080 10bit, 4GB test parameters)

Nvidia GPUs are absolutely out of the question, as they are inferior for use with Color.

Lowering Color's Internal Pixel Format setting to 10bit does not help the playback performance at all (I normally always stay in Floating Point, as it has a significant effect on the quality and accuracy of things like initial HSL qualification)

Turning off "Synchronize Refresh" does seem to improve playback by a barely noticeable amount.

It just occurred to me that the R3D footage *is* in 16:9, not 2:1...I'm beginning to think that this is the culprit. Thankfully, I was able to get through my grading session today with the client, but it would be nice to figure out what the cause of the slowdown is. I'll have to try 2:1 R3Ds next...hopefully that solves it.

btw, I'm running 10.5.5 w/ all updates installed and Kona3 with 6.0.2 drivers (though the problem still occurred under 6.0.1 drivers). System RAM is from TransIntl, and installed in matched pairs.
 
Cail Young said:
Set Color to single-display mode temporarily and put Activity monitor on the other display; see if it's pegging your CPUs on playback.
Click to expand...

There's no appreciable performance difference when in Single-display mode.

Interestingly enough, none of the 8 CPU cores are anywhere near pegged out when playing back. They hover at 50% at best.

Here's a representative grab of the CPU usage I'm seeing on playback:

20081215-nbmch5s9rjr6mkpyfjmdk1n66q.jpg
 
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