Adobe Premier Pro Mac Specs

[hans de vries]

O wow, I'd decided not to throw magic bullet onto 3 layers of r3d's right away; now I have three layers that are pretty heavily deformed and the line is still yellow. Scheduling the steps you're going to take makes a lot of difference.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Currently I have a MacPro 8 Core (2009) 2.26GHz with 32GB memory. I've got the the ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics card installed.

Am I right in saying that I need to replace this with the NVIDIA Quadro FX4800 1.5GB PCIe card for r3d real time playback?

I take it I can run with:

Slot 1: NVIDIA 4800
Slot 2: Red Rocket
Slot 3: Black Magic Decklink 4K card (for viewing output)
Slot 4: 8GB Fibre Channel Card (linked to Storage)

My $0.02...

Your system will do real-time playback just fine as it is! Most all decompression / debayer is done at the CPU level, as it is 100% that way with R3D files. The Rocket assists, but it's actually more useful for final rendering and initial source settings control where you're working with individual frames at full resolution. During edit, you're working with lower-resolution debayer processing, so the Rocket can actually be a bottleneck on some of the newer, more powerful systems. CS5.5 handles this much better or more intelligently now. With CS5, there were times I had to turn the Rocket off during editing to keep my performance up!

With the ATI card, You just won't get the CUDA acceleration for additional FX and color processing. Of course, it helps to get that, so the best nVidia/CUDA card at the moment for the Mac is the Quadro 4000. The FX4800 is nearly 3 generations behind and is similar in performance, actually slower in many cases with newer texture/CUDA operations. The only reason it's still expensive is because vendors still have them and people are still buying them for stupid prices because they think it's a better card. In actuality, it's been discontinued.

Another video card option is the GTX285. It's a touch faster than the FX4800 and from the same generation of GPUs. You can pick one up for around $300(US). Shameless plug, I'm going to be posting one for sale any day now here. But it has a few caveats as well, first and foremost, it's also discontinued and has become hard to find. That leads to questions of continued support down the line. Like the FX4800 it requires a double-width slot space and two 6-pin PCIe aux power connectors. The Quadro 4000 is single-width and only requires one power connector. Which is handy as you can put two Quadro4000 cards into a Mac Pro, if you plan to run Resolve. Performance between the GTX285 and Quadro4000 is almost identical. Quadro4000 seems to be pulling ahead with the latest CUDA implementation and some of the newer benchmarks / better optimization. At least that's in the Mac world. In Windows/Linux, the Quadro4000 is a solid 5-7% faster than the GTX285 for most operations.

As for the rest of your configuration, looks fine. I do question the Fiber Channel card. It's fine if you are already using storage/SAN with an FC interface. If not, I would recommend going 6Gbps SAS. The ATTO H680 is a great option for a SAS controller.

I would recommend 24GB RAM in the 2009 Mac Pro. This way, you can preserve triple-channel memory access by installing 6 x 4GB DIMMs. The next best configuration is probably 8x2GB for 16GB total... Falling below 16GB can become a bottleneck if you start doing a lot of serious work, keeping multiple 64bit applications open. 32GB is probably overkill and it lowers the overall performance of your RAM.

You will want your primary storage you work from to sustain 300MB/s or more. I like to think of 100MB/s minimum for each stream of 4K or 5K R3D I'll be working with. I'm not sure how RED has implemented the R3D file I/O in the SDK, but it seems to do multiple reads or take more read bandwidth than the bit-rate of the files would suggest, could also have to do with buffering on the debayer and the timing at which the reads are done. Anyway, fast storage is a must for working with R3D files in any application.

Depending on how much of this stuff you already have or don't have, you may want pause just a bit if you're not in a hurry. We should see new Mac Pro systems with the new Intel chipset release. Probably next month.